The Mountain City Defense System
40 min | performance lecture | multi-channel video installation | 2019


The "Mountain City Defense System" refers to the connection between the topography and waterways of southwest Chongqing and its special mountain space, and the way of life and production presented by the settled civilizations that emerged from this combination of geological conditions. The performance lecture takes the waterway from Jialing River to Yangtze River as a geographical clue, traces back to the local history of Chongqing, imagines a local future under the global "apocalyptic" background, and tries to explore the modernity potential of agricultural settlement civilization with southwest mountains as a sample from the perspectives of technology, survival strategy and geo-social form. The presentation consists of three main sections and structures, corresponding to three different local spaces and time points. It involves the ancient battlefield relics of the Song-Mongolian battles in Chinese history - the Diaoyu Castle in Hechuan. A small-scale mountain fortress on the southwest frontier that used the natural terrain of Sichuan and Chongqing and the defense mechanism derived from it to stop the progress of nomads sweeping across the Eurasian continent; the history of the national industrialist Lu Zuofu who put into practice in the southwest town of Beibei, China's earliest model of a modern urban democratic special zone; and the history of the internal migration history of the Third Front Construction extended by Chongqing artillery school during the War of Resistance.