Haifan Hu Angela

In between is a personal project on the theme of light and shadow, telling the story of my relationship with three cities.

Light is the source of all things, the illumination of light creates light and shadow and colour. It brings static objects to life.

My project is to document through the cyanotype, tracing the memories that flow between light and shadow. Although the memory will dissipate, it will make me who I am in the present moment. By recording light and shadow I express my memories of three cities where I was born, grew up and formed, in Wenzhou (China), Prato (Italy) and London (England).
The city of my birth is a blur, but it does exist, it is the early me, my skeleton. The city I grew up in is much clearer to me, always warm and bright in retrospect. For London, on the other hand, the memory is sombre; it's not exactly beautiful, but it does make me feel unpleasant and even painful most of the time.

The final outcome is an amalgamation of these three cities into one, with the final product in the form of a bound book. The binding is an evolution of the most common concertina folding, consisting of an 8x8cm outer frame and a 5x5cm inner page. The interlocking paper is intended to show a sense of architecture and to respond to the appearance of the city.

The outer frame represents the memory of China, made of a texture that imitates light. The memories of China are few and far between, wisps of it, but it echoes the present for me. On one side of the inner frame is a memory of being in Italy, a warm and bright memory expressed by extending the exposure time to get a more saturated blue. The other side is a sombre memory of England, a greyish blue obtained by manipulating the paper and controlling the exposure time.

The city is made up of its streets and buildings, and the issue of privacy and openness of the street level is closely related to the city. The fundamental issue is the need to balance privacy with openness. As the global urban population grows exponentially, cities become more dense and concerns about safety due to the epidemic and street crime increase, and these issues are more important than ever. It is the responsibility of architects and planners to address these issues effectively.
My main image is Tetris, inspired by the radical architectural innovation trend that started in Japan in the 1960s: the Metabolism, which was seen to last forever.
Metabolic architects at the time wanted to create a more organic development that was mobile, that could grow, that was metabolizable, that even broke out into the air and into the sea. This idea of the organism was a very, very much needed spirit.
Its most emblematic building is Kisho Kurokawa's capsule house, a detachable structure made up of many modules.
The use of the 3D image of Tetris, with appropriate white space, gives more space to the image to express the urgency for more shared space as a result of population growth.