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"That Zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is–all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the "romantic ruin" because the buildings don't fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other out of date things."
Robert Smithson's description of the landscape of Passaic in 1967 might be applied to that of the nearly 1:1 representation of sections of Paris currently being built outside of Hangzhou, China. The Eiffel Tower rises out of weedy scrub land and acres of nineteenth-century apartment buildings are juxtaposed against a backdrop of contemporary high-rise. This "Paris, China" is the subject of Jesper Just's video installation, Intercourses, commissioned for the Danish Pavilion at this year's Biennale. “In the film," Just explains in an interview with Kevin McGarry for TMagazine "they’re still building the city, but it’s already falling apart. That’s why it looks so strange — like a ruin already.”
Intercourses is animated by three interconnecting layers; the act of replication–the re-presentation of the iconic images "Paris", "Eiffel Tower" etc.; the falling into ruin of that representation as it is replicated/constructed and at the moment of being replicated/constructed; but more significantly the ideas of transference, comprehension and absorbtion suggetsed by the geo-cultural complication of three French African-descended protagonists navigating a representation of the city of Paris, a representation presented by the Other of the old Orientalism, an act which sees the Other become the willing appropriator (importer/consumer) of Western culture.
Copying in China, as in the West, is an essential part of cultural development and basic learning; when you learn to write you copy for example. The Chinese Emperor Qin Shihuang copied the monuments of his enemies. As the ancient historian Sima Qian writes, "Each time Qin conquered a warring state, the palace of the enemy was destroyed and a replica was built on the Northern Bank of the Wei River." (From Sima Qian, Selection from the Records of the Historian, quoted in, Mrk M Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Prakash, A Global History of Architecture, John Wiley and Sons, 2011.)
