Convergence 142

The shape of a city, as we all know, changes more quickly than the mortal heart.

- Charles Baudelaire

Convergence 142 proposes an alternative reading of the city, in direct opposition to the generalisations that permeate the broad discourse around urbanism. It attempts a reading of the urban condition centered not on the big picture but on the details: in this specific context, it is not a call to build cities differently but to look at them differently.

For this exhibition, each of the 100 architects participating in the Ordos Project, as well as the 42 artists whose works are included in the Museum’s collection, were invited to describe a place in their city of special significance to them. A slip in the urban fabric that betrays something secret or suppressed – or simply overlooked. Something curious and unexpected, something that in the eyes of each author – as critical observers of urban space – offers a more nuanced insight into the identity of their city than could be achieved through exhaustive descriptions. As with Italo Calvino’s fragmentary depiction of Venice in Invisible Cities (as narrated by Marco Polo, the first documented Western visitor to Mongolia), the collection of urban samplings that emerges is unfocused and subjective, but reveals as much about the identity of the contemporary city as many pages of statistical analysis.

These 142+ places will constitute a kind of future archaeology of Ordos: as with the Ordos Project and the collection itself, each of the participants will bring a fragment of their own city and their own culture to Inner Mongolia.