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FICTION |
NON-FICTION |
As Big As The Sky |
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In China you can dream. Phenomenal conditions are reshaping reality — rendering in concrete forms outlandish to gravity, and ideas that would amaze the sky. Only once you start dreaming, you surrender the power to say where your dream goes. European architect Sem Aers is working hard. He has to, given the speed at which the project's moving. The speed and the scale. And the nature of it all … A commission to design a fantastical megastructure in a remote village in China has lured Sem into visions of unearthly splendour. His client Wu Cai, who grew up humbly among the village's cows and rice paddies, is now one of China's fresh generation of self-made millionaires. Returning to his former home to realise a boyhood dream, Wu calls for a monument to be built — both to himself, and to the rise of the world's newest superpower. It requires the creation of an architecture that is itself dreamlike, utopian, transformative. Sem continues working furiously — deliriously — but a conspiracy of elements seems to be gathering against him. If reality can bend one way, then why not another? Just as the distortions are reaching terrifying proportions, Sem hears a woman’s voice. Below his office, Mulan is singing Chinese opera. Could this be the thread he needs: a glimpse onto an authentic culture, and at last the touch of something human? Inspired by the rise of China, As Big As The Sky confronts the astonishing wave of building that is currently sweeping across the country, and the dramatic collisions it creates between traditional culture, globalizing forces, new forms of media — and between a once European world and a new modernity with Chinese characteristics. As Big As The Sky merges Western Romanticism with traditional Chinese opera, and combines them onstage with the cutting edge use of mixed media techniques in film, architecture and projected light.
WORK IN PROGRESS PRODUCTION full production scheduled for 2014
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