by Francesca Girelli and DavideQuadrio

Our feet are perhaps marching ahead but our upper halves are leaning backward

QiuZhijie

Just as Venice and Shanghai, the Chinese province of Fujian, home to QiuZhijie and one of the earliest provinces open to foreign trade, is a land of merchants and cross-cultural encounters. QiuZhijie was born in Zhangzhou, a city that borders on the famous trading center of Quanzhou. When Marco Polo visited Quanzhou (referred to in his writings as Zayton), it was fabled to be home to over 100,000 Arab traders, and in his memoirs, the traveler de­scribes the harbor as one of the greatest havens of commerce , perhaps the largest seaport in the Eastern hemisphere.

Thanks to frequent exchanges with the outside world, Fujianese culture is still different from that which we can encounter in Central China, and even the languages currently spoken in the province continue to bear evidence of a past marked by the integration of foreign into local cultures. While planning this first stage of the New Roads Project, which retraces the itineraries from the past to the present and back, thinking about that faraway time in which Quanzhou became the point of origin of the famous “silk road on the sea” is a whimsical amusement. We cannot refrain from imagining Marco Polo, who, from that precise location, undertook his return journey to Venice in 1292 following his incredible Asian adventures.

In addition to this unique situational background, there are multiple other reasons why we have decided to begin New Roads with an intervention by China-based artist QiuZhijie in the two permanent collections. The first reason is that QiuZhijie's practice is based on the concept of what he defines as total art , which is centered on the awareness that artistic creation cannot be uprooted from its historical and cultural background, and that there is no division between disciplines. Total art stems from QiuZhijie's archive of incredibly heterogeneous and multicultural references that are constantly drenching his works. Moreover, by exploring these multidisciplinary issues and references, QiuZhijie has developed a deep and interconnected understanding of the relationships between the past, the present and the future as they are universally viewed and as they are viewed within China.

The artist's incredibly detached and rational view of society and its relationship with temporality most likely originated with his training as a calligrapher, whose practice includes routinely imitating the writings of his predecessors, allowing for the preservation of traces from the past .

As one of the curators of the 2 nd Triennale of Nanjing (2005), entitled Archeology of the Future , QiuZhijie has already begun considering contemporary artists' interventions in our society through relationships strictly with the past. In doing so, the artist has examined the ways in which time was per­ceived in ancient China, when people rarely talked about the future .

QiuZhijie tells us how in imperial China the ideal world remained in a remote past, whereas nowadays we seem to be able only to envision the future to such an extent that we may overlook our present since we view it as if it was merely the waiting room before our destiny. The curious thing is that the artist sees in this change of vision and attitude a possible Judo-Christian influence, which has transmitted and convinced the whole world to adopt the idea of a linear progression of time by promoting hope in a better future .

From this, it can be supposed that Europe has changed the way in which Chinese people view their present and past, but this has not stopped Europeans from still being utterly and completely deeply-rooted in their own past.

This change in the way that the Chinese view their present and past appears then to have been produced by a combination of their own digestion of European philosophy and religion and the disaster of the Cultural Revolution that, to quote QiuZhijie, had almost wiped out a nation .

According to Qiu's analysis of what needs to be done to achieve a sensible and constructive relationship with time, we have to change our attitude and start questioning the present as we live through it, since our perception of the present is nothing but a tale with which historians and the media have been indoctrinating us. This tale we are all told is a recollection of real facts that however excludes mention of any other possible path we might well have taken.

This tendency to put focus on what is yet to come instead of revisiting the past is sometimes a deliberate choice and, in the case of China, has been forcibly instituted with rules that pervade the people's daily lives. In 2011, for instance, on the occasion of the 90 th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party, all movies with any reference to time travel werebanned. Showing characters travelling back in time and making alternative choices that would change the present and therefore also the future were not to be encouraged, and the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television issued a guidance for film makers, suggesting that they focus instead on the central spirit of the party by launching vivid reproductions of the Chinese revolution, the nation's construction and China's reform and opening up. But shouldn't we be able to map all the crossroads, forks and turning points that we have taken so that we may then have the instruments that will allow us to choose our future paths?

To do so, we should start questioning our past and unearth all of its clues that have gone missing or that have been deliberately hidden, thereby demon­strating that the potential power of “turning the present/future” into cultural/political –and untimely - social instability (in haste, according to the Chinese Confucian mentality) can be directed against positive and “balanced” outcomes. This exactly embodies the goal of New Roads. QiuZhijie has titled this attitude Archeology of the Future , paralleling perfectly the activities that QueriniStampalia Foun­dation has been developing over the past few years and bringing what Arthub Asia has been developing in the last decades to a turning point.

In line with all the interventions by the artists who had participated in Conservation of the Future at the Venetian institutions, QiuZhijie considers artistic behavior an alternative narrative that allows artworks from the past and present to become the cultural sediment in the archaeological study of the future .

QiuZhijie creates through his conceptual maps a new archive of references sourced from two ware­houses of memory, the collections of the QueriniStampalia and the Aurora Museum, pinpointing for us spatially and temporally the encounters and dissociations that our cultures have undergone.

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1'QiuZhijie, Do we really have a future? , Archaeology of the future: The second triennial of Chinese Art , 2005, exhibition catalogue

2'At this city you must know is the Haven of Zayton, frequented by all the ships of India, which bring thither spicery and all other kinds of costly wares. It is the port also that is frequented by all the merchants of Manzi, for hither is imported the most astonishing quantity of goods and of precious stones and pearls, and from this they are distributed all over Manzi. And I assure you that for one shipload of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere, destined for Christendom, there come a hundred such, aye and more too, to this haven of Zayton; for it is one of the two greatest havens in the world for commerce.' Travels of Marco Polo, Book 2 Chapter 82. The Complete Yule-Cordier Edition: Including the Unabridged Third Edition (1903) of Henry Yule's Annotated Translation, as Revised by Henri Cordier, Together with Cordier's Later Volume of Notes and Addenda (1920)

3'Meiling Cheng, De/visualizing Calligraphic Archaeology: QiuZhijie's Total Art , TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 2009, New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Tech­nology, pp. 17-34, p.20

4‘[…] people rarely talked about the future. Even if they did touch upon it, it was when they thought about the past: One can tell the present from the past, as well as tell the past from the present.' QiuZhijie, Do we really have a future?, Archaeology of the future: The second triennial of Chinese Ar t, 2005, exhibition catalogue

5'QiuZhijie identifies this turning point of the Chinese relationship with the past and future as following the translation of foreign texts such as Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, translated by Yan Fu in1901. QiuZhijie, Do we really have a future?, Archaeology of the future: The second triennial of Chinese Art , 2005, exhibition catalogue

6‘For a nation that was nearly wiped out completely as a result of overindulgence with traditional values, the idea that backwardness means getting beaten is deep-rooted'. QiuZhijie, Do we really have a future?, Archaeology of the future: The second triennial of Chinese Art, 2005, exhibition catalogue.

7‘Artistic behavior should be considered as a kind of narrative, that is to say, a kind of remains for the archaeological study of the future. Through this sort of remains and the cohabitation of all kinds of remains, we are able to construct an imagination of ourselves as cultural accumulation and sedimentation'. QiuZhijie, Do we really have a future?, Archaeology of the future: The second triennial of Chinese Art , 2005, exhibition catalogue.

QiuZhijie's Organic Cartographies

by Chiara Bertola

We have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false. (J.L. Borges, Handbook of Fantastic Zoology)

Now that Qiu's maps are displayed on the walls of the third floor of the FondazioneQuerini, some features that can aid us in reading them are clearly emerging.

These are maps with no sharp boundaries, which would simply be implausible as they are the reflection of something that is very much alive and steadily mutating, similar to the formation of knowledge, to the construction of a theory or to the recounting of a tale. For this reason, it is easier to relate them to something organic, to the image of a plant, to willowy branches, to the knots in a tree, to colossal anthropomorphic silhouettes. They do not relate to the geometrical mappings of the terrestrial gradients.

The sixteen maps exhibited here seem to have been conceived with an awareness of the impossibility of rendering something that does not have a defined shape... The cartography created by this artist, who is conscious of the fact that nothing is generated from nothing, is actually woven from the threads of many narratives, of many pathways, particularly those stories about the connections between societies and the transmission of knowledge, media and techniques.

What emerges is the idea that the cultural and formal links that subsist between different realities mutually nurture each other, unfolding in ways that are at once complex and unexpected, full of misunderstandings, myths and preconceptions, as well as real circumstances and discoveries. When Qiu affirms, “My map will focus on how an image, even if originated from antique seeds, was afterwards adulterated and transformed through the transmission process of the culture itself […]”, the density and complexity of this cartographic structure becomes clear, as the maps were created from a multiplicity of disparate stories that could not always be linked through a system of causes and effects.

We instinctively think of Deluze and Guattari'srizhome , which is the ideal model of decentralized knowledge. QiuZhijie's maps create a plurality of paths in diverse directions, and they develop by forming a net of ramifications that could grow infinitely, progressively generating more and more distant connections.

Within QiuZhijie's intricate system of mapping, the complexity of another Atlas is echoed powerfully, that of Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne.

At the center of Warburg's focus was the process behind the formation of iconography, the production of images and ideas thro ugh the gestures and expressions conveyed by Occidental visual culture. This art historian succeeded in creating an unfinished piece, as it is actually infinite and, most importantly, open. It is not a simple assemblage of images, but rather is a dynamic representation of western gestures from Classical Greece through the Modern Age, relaying them just as they have been passed on through European traditions of visual memory.

And yet, how not to parallel the archivistic passion shared by Arburg and Qiu: even if in their practices are performed differently, at the core of each is the same desire to organize and manage immense volumes of data, images, symbols, gestures - in maps for Qiu and on plates for Warburg – and the same anti-hierarchical attitude within a working process founded in ruptures, discontinuities, and heterogeneities.

As a matter of fact, in QiuZhijie's cartography, we encounter the parallel coexistence of cultural behaviors and cognitive process derived from Taoism, Buddism and the European philosophical tradition, in primis, from the Warburghian revolution. I think about the logic within them, which, much like that of Benjamin's Constellations, branches out with fragmentation and discontinuity; they exhibit an ontology that privileges tracing and classifying images through their immediacy and spontaneity as conduits and symptomatic indicators, making the distinction between form and content appear inadequate and obsolete.

We previously mentioned the Rizhome while discussing this circuitous and fragmented way of expanding, but it also applies in terms of its decentralized aggregations. Of course, now that all of the sixteen maps are displayed on the walls, Qiu's murals/maps, on a visual level, are possibly the most illustrative incarnation of Deleuze and Guattari's new philosophy. The temporality that Qiu aims to represent is not of history but rather of memory and survival: it is the temporality of images.

The greatness of QiuZhijie's project, and also the aspect that most relates it to Warburg's precepts, is that it is not about the creation of an image-based collection but is rather about “thinking in images”. Didi-Huberman wrote about an “active memory”, a term that could be applied to QiuZhijie's work. Every map represents a topic, the development of transmissible display. But every map remains open to possible further references, which are positioned in relation to each other according to magnetic attractions. Every map has been generated from the rational world, and precisely because of this drivingforce it is always incomplete, never closed.

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8The particular characteristic of the rhizome, able to autonomous­ly generating new plants even in adverse conditions, brought some thinkers to take it as a metaphor, to symbolize some concepts. Carl Gustav Jung adopted the term rhizome when addressing the invis­ible nature of life, that is mostly developed in an underground level, whereas what is actually visible only lasts for one season and then ends, without permanently interrupting the vital flow. The rhizome metaphor has been also adopted by Gilles Deleuze e Felix Guattari to characterize a certain type of philosophic research that spurs without defined gates of entry and exit and without internal hierarchy. In their pivotal work, the Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari compare the rhizomatic nature of thinking to the arboreal one, typical of traditional philosophy, that is developed hierarchically and linearly, following rigid binary – dualistic – categories; the rhizomatic thinking instead, is capable of establish productive connections in any direction.

The Mind Maps and the Search for the Phoenix

By Marco Ceresa

Cartography is not an exact science. Each map is primarily a representation of a point of view. It represents the observer as much as the facts represented.

As with any representation, it is not innocent and it is not objective. While modern technology has made it possible to compile physical maps that are both precise and thorough, the political structure of the world, the changes of borders and the very existence of some countries are still validated and legitimized by their inclusion in a map. The map recounts, enchants, and lies. It creates the laws of its own universe. In the world constructed by unachievable distances and physical boundaries that were hard to cross — such was the world before Marco Polo — cartography could only count on travelers' tales, often themselves tales of tales of other travelers met along the way.

The map, therefore, is essentially made of crossroads of narrated tales. Two good examples, one Venetian and one Italian, are the Map of Fra Mauro (1450), influenced by Marco Polo and the Chinese experience, and the KunyuWanguoQuanTu ( ﾀ､ 舆 ﾍ抦ｫ 图 — Complete Map of all the Kingdoms in the World) printed for the first time in China, in 1602, by the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, at the request of Emperor Wanli.

The earliest cartographic representations in China date back to the time of Warring States (fifth century B.C.), rarely known to the rest of the world outside of China due to its ancientry. However, China has had a history of isolation, partly due to physical and geographical constraints, just like Venice, and partly because of an intellectual and political focus, from mid-eighteenth till the end of the nineteenth century and then again during part of the twentieth century, on the inland rather than the outside world, unlike Venice. It will be only under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) that, through the travels of Admiral Zhang He, China will be able to produce a map of the world which also includes what is outside of its borders.

Antique Chinese maps, like those of Italy, were mostly narrated maps—which were based on travelers' stories, tainted and fictional. Now that technology and satellite images allow us to produce very precise and thorough maps reflective of the physical reality of the world that can be easily updated as changes of borders and sovereignty occur, what other kind of new maps can we compile? QiuZhijie's answer is: mind maps.

QiuZhijie does not draw geo-political or geographic maps that include actual states and their boundaries.His are maps of the soul or mind. They appear as islands and cities by the river and sea, sometimes zoomorphic, other times anthropomorphic, in shapes such as a big fish, a large sleeping giant, strange and eccentric forms, agglomerates and large protozoa, creatures from the medieval bestiary, with surrounding waters overtly present or strongly noticeable.

They are maps of mind and reason, of this world and the otherworld, Chinese and not: the Kingdom of Heaven, The Republic of Plato, The Gulf of Samsara, the Pure Land, and the Capitalism. They are both Western and Asian, ancient and modern. Some may recall the old cartography, both visually and graphically; others are closer to the famous “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” by Saul Steinberg (cover of The New Yorker, March 29, 1976). And even when QiuZhijie is not drawing maps but animals as in the work where he superimposes them on a background that recalls funerary paintings of the Han period, his animals are as hybridized as his maps, because they represent a blending of different zoological and cultural morphologies. The siling ﾋﾄﾁ È, the four mythical animals of the Chinese tradition—the Unicorn, the Dragon, the Phoenix and the Turtle—appear in this representation, which almost looks like an aquatic scene with fishes replaced by the four creatures.

However, they are shown in mutated forms rather than the original ones with Western medieval bestiary influence. Themes and techniques mingle with, crossbreed and contaminate each other. They produce the Lion of St. Mark, the Dragon of St. George, the griffon vulture, two-headed monsters, and strange water creatures. Only the Phoenix seems to be missing.This very elusive bird, most representative of Venicein its contact with the East (à la Saïd) and China, ishidden from view.

As always, chevisiaciascun lo dice/ovesianessunlo sa (everybody says it's there/ but nobody can tellwhere - PietroMetastasio, Demetrius, 1731). But it isnot absent. We find it in the upper left corner, in theform of a prey bird stylized as a bronze piece fromthe Shang Dynasty, or at the bottom center, as apeacock of the Han Dynasty. A transnational and, atthe same time, trans-cultural animal par excellence,the Phoenix appears in various names in Asia, Fenghuang,Vermilion Bird, Simurgh, Roc, and ArabianPhoenix, and later lands in Venice. And it becomesa site on the city map: a theater, which burnt downthree times and rose again its own ashes—another“eastern” element that has become tied to the Venetianimagery.

QiuZhijie, Do we really have a future? , Archaeology of the future: The second triennial of Chinese Art , 2005, exhibition catalogue

‘At this city you must know is the Haven of Zayton, frequented by all the ships of India, which bring thither spicery and all other kinds of costly wares. It is the port also that is frequented by all the merchants of Manzi, for hither is imported the most astonishing quantity of goods and of precious stones and pearls, and from this they are distributed all over Manzi. And I assure you that for one shipload of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere, destined for Christendom, there come a hundred such, aye and more too, to this haven of Zayton; for it is one of the two greatest havens in the world for commerce.' Travels of Marco Polo, Book 2 Chapter 82. The Complete Yule-Cordier Edition: Including the Unabridged Third Edition (1903) of Henry Yule's Annotated Translation, as Revised by Henri Cordier, Together with Cordier's Later Volume of Notes and Addenda (1920)

Meiling Cheng, De/visualizing Calligraphic Archaeology: QiuZhijie's Total Art , TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 2009, New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Tech­nology, pp. 17-34, p.20

‘[…] people rarely talked about the future. Even if they did touch upon it, it was when they thought about the past: One can tell the present from the past, as well as tell the past from the present.' QiuZhijie, Do we really have a future?, Archaeology of the future: The second triennial of Chinese Ar t, 2005, exhibition catalogue

QiuZhijie identifies this turning point of the Chinese relationship with the past and future as following the translation of foreign texts such as Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, translated by Yan Fu in1901. QiuZhijie, Do we really have a future?, Archaeology of the future: The second triennial of Chinese Art , 2005, exhibition catalogue

‘For a nation that was nearly wiped out completely as a result of overindulgence with traditional values, the idea that backwardness means getting beaten is deep-rooted'. QiuZhijie, Do we really have a future?, Archaeology of the future: The second triennial of Chinese Art, 2005, exhibition catalogue.

‘Artistic behavior should be considered as a kind of narrative, that is to say, a kind of remains for the archaeological study of the future. Through this sort of remains and the cohabitation of all kinds of remains, we are able to construct an imagination of ourselves as cultural accumulation and sedimentation'. QiuZhijie, Do we really have a future?, Archaeology of the future: The second triennial of Chinese Art , 2005, exhibition catalogue.

The particular characteristic of the rhizome, able to autonomous­ly generating new plants even in adverse conditions, brought some thinkers to take it as a metaphor, to symbolize some concepts. Carl Gustav Jung adopted the term rhizome when addressing the invis­ible nature of life, that is mostly developed in an underground level, whereas what is actually visible only lasts for one season and then ends, without permanently interrupting the vital flow. The rhizome metaphor has been also adopted by Gilles Deleuze e Felix Guattari to characterize a certain type of philosophic research that spurs without defined gates of entry and exit and without internal hierarchy. In their pivotal work, the Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari compare the rhizomatic nature of thinking to the arboreal one, typical of traditional philosophy, that is developed hierarchically and linearly, following rigid binary – dualistic – categories; the rhizomatic thinking instead, is capable of establish productive connections in any direction.