Beijing Barn Bibliotheca
2018

Arts Letters & Numbers in collaboration with the Central Academy of Fine Arts

In the Fall of 2018 we had the honour of contributing to the ‘Future Unknown’ Chancellor’s Summit held at The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, China. The project grew from careful consideration of the mission and vision of CAFA and the principles driving the “Future Unknown” initiative to move art and innovation forward by building linkages to many educational and cultural locations around the globe.

The one-month project, led by David Gersten, began at Arts Letters & Numbers’ Averill Park, NY campus, where a group of students and faculty from CAFA and a team of fellows and visiting artists from ALN came together. We started by covering the entire interior of our barn with paper, making a full-size paper model of the barn inside of itself. Within this ‘paper barn’, we did a series of exercises, working with maps of Beijing and New York through drawings, rubbings, and projections, and we created a giant drawing of these two cities inside of each other. When the drawings were complete, we carefully took the papers down, rolled them up and sent them to Beijing with the CAFA group on their flight home: Barn in a Suitcase! These papers were then un-rolled and re-assembled in Beijing into a new work, a Beijing Barn Bibliotheca that contains all of the locations. The Project culminated with a ‘Barn Raising’ in Beijing; transforming the Paper Barn into a giant piano keyboard, which was then played for the entire Chancellor’s Summit. We have created a film which captures the essence of the project.

Creating a work at Arts Letters & Numbers’ NY campus that was physically brought back to Beijing and transformed into a new work was a gesture, expressing that culture is more than information and cultural exchange is more than information sharing. Culture is thick: it is people, it is material, it is stories. Embracing “cultural diversity” as a diversity of “ways of knowing” must include our embodied experiences, our literary and material imaginations, and all of the nuance and imagination of life itself. Each project brings new ideas and understandings to the broader ALN project, in this collaboration, we discovered that a barn in Averill Park contained a Piano in Beijing.