New Ruralism - AAVS Xixinan 2017
Within the context of China’s urbanization, the residual status of Rural China is the theme of AAVS Xixinan. Hosted in an exceptionally beautiful heritage village, Xixinan, located near the Huangshan Mountains in Anhui Province, China, this experiment shuns nostalgia, sentimentality and the tendency to lament the perceived loss of the rural. The propensity to retreat from urbanization, industrialisation and globalisation, endeavouring the resuscitation of an absent past no longer fully nor ubiquitously present. This 9-day workshop takes on the urgency of issues within an increasingly Urban China, which effect the entire country as much as the whole world: Migration, social change, inequity; food and energy supply; agriculture, industry and habitation; and, ecological resilience and sustainability. As such, the verdict for culpability for the causes of the complex contemporary status of the rural does not point towards the technological apparatus of urbanization. In AAVS Xixinan, advanced sensing, simulation, data processing and design technologies will serve merely the agency with which to propose innovative alternatives to longstanding global problematics.