Migrant Landscapes is a long term project about rural migration in Shanghai.
Particular lives are moving around the world to find a better live every day, particularly in China around 20 million people move every year to big cities to fulfil their dreams. This project talks about three particular lives of those immigrants, in this city. From the conducted interviews, I built this emotional topography to tell the story of their lives, where every valley, hill, and mountain talk about their life in their home town and their new life in Shanghai. This natural unreal topography is the emotional map of each life, and can be read as the relation between single persons with their families, their jobs, and their friends with the geographical location and movements through China. Many times the first work they do is recovering cardboard from the trash to sell it for recycle, that’s why I made this paper by hand, recycled from cardboard I bough to them. This cardboard becomes the substrate to take root, being the plants a metaphor of this process represented by the growing seeds embedded in the paper. This way, these plants and these maps become a tribute to everyone who is fighting for their dreams.
Interviews conducted in collaboration with Tiffany Fung.
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