ReclaimCQ

When arriving in Chongqing, one quickly realises, this, this city is something else. A mass, an organism of a whole other calibre. And I say that after making Hong Kong my home.

Density comes in different gradations. One quickly realises that every person has a different level of what is acceptable when it comes to density. I grew up in a medieval city, Bruges, and here I often people hear people say we don’t need these ‘towers’, the city is already dense enough. And with towers they mean 10 floors, max. Now, after living in Hong Kong for over 5 years, density became a way of life, one has to ‘just cope with’. You can argue, its inhumane, its depressing, its a whole lot of not so great terms, and yes it probably all of the before but one has to accept. And that’s what I did. And secretly, love it.

Now, Chongqing is as I said before a whole different calibre of density. I have travelled and photographed a number of times in the city, and I notice myself standing often on the streets looking around and be amazed of what this beast is. I took the metro from the airport, and the transfer station was not just a station, it was one hanging underneath a bridge hanging over a river. Space saving brought to a new level, literally dangling underneath. The tone was set for a week of further exploring and searching for moments of contrast. A first photo series I took in Chongqing, was searching for a human aspect in the mass of concrete. Aptly titled Human vs City, I ensured that every photo had a least 1 person casually strolling around the frame. Often small, but always present, they were the unknowing protagonist in a quiet battle for existence. Human in an existential battle with the city, who was absurdly built by those human. A contradiction brought to live wherever I was walking in the city.

Now, a pandemic later, I was back in Chongqing looking for another contradiction. I found it in the infrastructure.

In a true Robert Moses fashion, Chongqing has infrastructure that is omnipresent. Moving 30+ million people on a daily basis requires a significant infrastructure network. Bridges are bold, roads are crossing straight through peninsulas, and flyover takes large swaths of land pushing people in ever smaller apartments. Robert Moses would have loved seeing it.

The dynamics of power in New York versus Chongqing are of course different. The number of people is also very different. But what is the same is that infrastructure takes the forefront. The bridges are humongous (and on many you are allowed to walk as a pedestrian, a rare treat in China) but it’s the way they cut through the city that is reminiscent of how Robert Moses saw his vision. And perhaps it is also how the citizens just have to accept that these bridges are needed, or rather just happen to be there. A sight of particular beauty to me, and was similar in Human vs City, is how people just carry on with life. Fishing on the river banks, in droves. A leisurely stroll with the family underneath a web of 8 lines road crisscrossing each other, why not? It is that co-existence that fascinates me. Human vs City, Human vs Infrastructure. Co-habitants in an organism that at times wants to suffocate you. It can be loud, but at the same time it’s quiet and soothing. There is little tension. It is recurring phenomena of co-existing.

Searching for vantage points across the vast city, I captured quiet moments in a buzzing city. And there are ample, surprisingly.

Traces of Human vs City come back to life, there are some people minding their own business ‘posing’ for the photo, there are of course the signature Chongqing bridges but overall the photos aim to capture the scale of the infrastructure in relation to its context. 

InfraCQ is a quiet observation of world’s largest city. The photos in this series deliberately try not to overwhelm, instead the photos look for balance, order, and quietness. They didn’t require me to crawl, climb or do heroic things. The viewpoints of these photos are there, as in, to be seen when strolling around the city. As a model citizen I walked around the city from morning till evening, without any targets. I captured the mundane, as a cohabitant of the other 20,000,000 million people in Chongqing at that time. Except the mundane isn’t so mundane when looking back.

InfraCQ is a series of 15 photos taken over a week in Chongqing.