Heike Baranowsky / Waszem Khan

By Janina Bach

There's no need to take a helicopter to get a bird's-eye view of Peking on film. The city's skyscrapers provide a panoramic view that stretches far into the distance. Heike Baranowsky and Waszem Khan, two artists who are collaborating on a video installation for the "Beijing Case", live in such a skyscraper in Peking. They have also shot footage from their own balcony. The curtain of smog over the city limits the visibility of the area closeby. But one can make out the flat roofs of a low-rise residential area, trees and paths between the buildings, and more skyscrapers in the distance. Off to one side, there is a park patroned by the residents of the area jammed in between modern high-rises.
The artists are filming various scenes in the city, park, plazas, traffic junctions, and lately, more and more people. Through long, gradual zooms, they restrict the viewer's field of vision and focus on specific movements and people. This gives the footage a voyeuristic character, invading, as Waszem Khan says, the individual's private sphere. Like films by Hitchcock, Coppola, Snow and Antonioni, the artists focus on certain moments and observe them separately from the rest.
The project reflects the standpoint of the West which is only familiar with China from a distance - the same way it observes China from a satellite perspective. In Peking, the artists have discovered the inconsistencies between the foreign perception of China and the view from within. They attempt to convey this experience cinematically. The shift from the far-off camera shot to the long zoom demonstrates how we approach things which are foreign to us. The cinematic view from the bird's-eye perspective, which then zooms and raises the individual from the masses, emphasises the significance of the individual in a seemingly homogeneous crowd. By providing the city with "identity and function", each person becomes important in the course of the project. To surmount the distance which the external viewer might feel, the artists speak to taxi drivers, retirees practicing juggling in the park, a knife-sharpener and a garbage collector. "We're very interested in capturing everyday life, the little, unpredictable things which almost always happen when filming..."
They are particularly interested in the circulation of the metropolis. Heike Baranowsky compares the movement of the city to the "circulatory system of an organism". Every day, its inhabitants move along concentric streets around the city. Retirees begin their days with morning exercise in the settlements in front of their homes or in nearby parks. The poorest residents of the city collect empty plastic bottles which they pile high in their wheel barrows and return to the recycling centres for a few yuan. For the artists, the regular, rhythmic sounds are part of the city's circulation - the monotonous cries of street vendors and workers who offer their wares or services, the noises from the garbage dumps.
In contrast to the cyclic movement normally seen in everyday life, here we observe the rather linear movement of high-speed urbanism. As Heike Baranowsky puts it, the artists want "to juxtapose the contradiction of a rapidly expanding city which constantly changes with the slowness of everyday life."