Of Haunted Spaces: Cinema, Heterotopias, and China's Hyperurbanization

Cities today are becoming what Michel Foucault has termed heterotopias, as assemblies of ruins, globalized business districts, ghost towns, and reconstructed historic districts come together in a single place. Nowhere is this more visible recently than in China and areas under China's developmental influence. For example, Chinese investments in Africa are heterotopias because they contain the idea of accumulating different times, cultures, and countries within one place, just as a theme park contains all these different place experiences in a bounded zone outside of its own time and culture.

Ella Raidel has explored these phenomena through film and cinematic virtual reality. In her films urbanism and architecture, theory, politics, social change, and image production are intertextually presented, and open a discursive space for investigation and commentary. In this artist's book, she reviews and reflects on the last two decades of her award-winning work. Of Haunted Spaces will be of interest to art and film practitioners, as well as students of architecture, film, urbanization, and infrastructure, especially those who see cinema as a way of exploring these subjects.

Distributed for the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art.