Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia / Bishankommunen: Hvordan man laver sin egen utopi
Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia / Bishankommunen: Hvordan man laver sin egen utopi
The Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia is a graphic montage, where thoughts, comments, and short accounts from Chinese activist, educator, and curator Ou Ning's travels to Bishan have been intertwined with drawings, clippings, handwritten notes, and pictures. Ou Nings’ goal with the Bishan Commune utopia is to realize the idea of an autonomous zone, where experiments with co-living, sharing, anarchism, community, self-organization, architecture, art practices, and rural tradition can take place, however difficult this might prove in the present-day China. The publication consists of two books: the first volume contains a facsimile of Ou Ning’s original notebook in full color; the second volume is a translation of the notebook from the Chinese by Mai Corlin and Austin Woerner, also including an interview with Ou Ning not previously published in English, as well as Ou Ning’s 2012 text “Autonomy: Utopia or Realpolitik,” which lays out Ou Ning’s understanding of ongoing anarchist practices in a totalitarian, capitalist reality.