Little Power

Qianfu Ye, Xinzhu Wu, Juliëtte Krol, Marieke van der Steen

Imagine a space where everything is possible. A space where you are completely free to do whatever comes to your mind. A space where you can set your own rules. Where you can build a tower out of bikes or use spaghetti to make a rope. A space where you can sit still all day, without having the feeling to be wasting your time. A space with a different feeling of time, where you can set your own rules and use your fantasy, a space where you are free. Maybe such a space sounds a bit utopian to you, as a reader. It may sound like an idyllic space that doesn’t exist.

However, maybe such spaces do exist; spaces that play with the rules of society. Spaces existing within a limited time and space, where it is possible to do things that are impossible in daily life. An example of such spaces are what the French philosopher Michel Foucault calls heterotopias. Heterotopias are real, localisable spaces within a society, that differ from all the other emplacements that can be found within a society, they are a kind of actualised utopic places (Foucault, 1984, p.178). An example of a heterotopic concept is play. In this text we focus on the concept of play by Johan Huizinga, who describes play as a free activity within a limited time and space. We will more thoroughly explain both concepts in the next paragraph about the theoretical framework.

We create our own heterotopia by playing. Our group consists of four people: Xinzhu (心竹) and Qianfu (倩甫), from China and Juliëtte and Marieke, from the Netherlands. Because we come from different cultural backgrounds and are used to speaking different languages, it is sometimes difficult to communicate and to make sure we speak about the same things. It is considered normal to use English as  lingua franca among people who don't speak the same language, but we question whether this really is the best and freest way to communicate. During the many conversations we had, we also found out that in distinct cultures several things may be seen as normal by some, while others form opposing assumptions. This is why we feel the necessity to play around with established social rules and norms, because they are not “natural” or “given” and we want to work with our cultural differences on this project. If we would just follow the rules and only act according to what people find normal in Amsterdam, then we wouldn’t make contact with interesting aspects of the Chinese culture. We therefore want to create a new, playful and free way to communicate with one another in our group, without using the English language. In order to achieve this, we will span a rope between our four houses, so we can communicate even across long distances. And we don't have to speak, we can just pull the rope. In addition we even can connect objects to the rope and send them to each other. In this way we create our own heterotopia.