The Density of an Hour

When I began my film project Tables, Doors, Songs—still a working title—I was newly pregnant. As the project evolved, and especially after my daughter's birth, my sense of time shifted completely. It became a new architecture layered over everything else: breastfeeding time, fragmented work time organized around her schedule. My first solo exhibition took place when she was seven months old; time was literally cut into pieces.

While filming in Shanghai, I stayed on the city's periphery in an almost empty, barely furnished apartment. The isolation was striking—gated communities stretched along the highway, far from the city's vibrant center. In contrast, the glittering core of Shanghai projects an illusion of connection to the wider world, but returning to the outskirts reveals a different reality: a vast urban sprawl where density coexists with profound alienation. That experience made me newly aware of the tension between center and periphery, and how these shifting geographies shape both belonging and dislocation.

The journeys between the outskirts and the city's glittering center were carried by migrant drivers, many living in precarious legal and economic situations. As a tiny film crew—just me, my partner behind the camera, and our daughter, who sometimes appears in the film—we often found ourselves in quiet proximity to their lives. In the car, we'd overhear phone calls: drivers saying goodnight to children they hadn't seen for months, asking about homework, making quick, tender check-ins across distance.

Some shared their stories with us—former fashion designers, workers who had lived under restrictive contracts in Japan, people who had only recently arrived in Shanghai. Many didn't know the streets well, not only because the cityscape changes so rapidly, with roads constantly renamed, but also because they were new to this immense sprawl. Their lives seemed defined by stretched and compressed time: fourteen-hour shifts that left them nodding off while driving, trying to earn enough to return home, even briefly. These movements between periphery and center, carried by those whose lives are suspended between places, became a quiet thread in how I experienced and filmed the city.

Buying apartments carries enormous weight in Asian societies, especially in China. It signifies adulthood and status, but it also brings crushing pressure—a desperate drive to live a "normal" life. I felt this pressure from my Shanghai family, navigating their ideas of what life should mean, though my thoughts were elsewhere.

For years I pushed these expectations aside, postponing motherhood until my early forties, when I finally had my daughter. I don't know how my life would have unfolded had I stayed in China. In Switzerland, I began learning a new language, and through that process—fragmentary, built word by word—I started collecting other fragments: texts from libraries, magazine clippings, images, and conversations. Slowly, they gave shape to a different understanding of myself, one not defined by my parents' expectations.

They valued mathematics and science, while I was drawn to language, literature, and images. We compromised: I studied architecture at ETH Zürich. Architecture training starts extreme—scheduled until five, but the first night you're there until midnight, continuing throughout seven years of education. You're constantly pushed to extremes of what you can deliver. Many workplaces use this to extract maximum from people through internships and other exploitation-prone models with little regulation or resistance. It becomes normalized. During those years, my parents moved back to Shanghai, which unexpectedly gave me space to breathe. Growing up I felt claustrophobic, but now they visit once a year, mostly to see my child.

Switzerland holds a duality for me—both constraint and liberation. It taught me that reality isn't fixed, that identities, like languages, can be pieced together and reassembled. It offered freedom, yet remained a blank space—quiet, measured, a middle ground without extremes.

In architecture school we worked through renderings and collages—assembling images from fragments. Embedded in those visions were ideas about class and about what a "good life" might look like. That process has stayed with me, shaping how I think but also making me more critical of images—more suspicious of how they construct realities that can be both seductive and hollow.

I think of Shanghai's skyscrapers this way: during the day they seem almost dull, stripped of vitality, but at night, under layers of light, they transform into something between reality and fiction—projections of desire and aspiration. This act of assembling fragments into a provisional whole connects to my working method, and to what I also recognize in your practice. The world is pieced together from fragments, and identity, too, emerges through this ongoing layering.

A New York artist-filmmaker at Art Week called Shanghai's architecture ugly. He's both right and wrong. Much of the skyline speaks the global language of glass and malls—a kind of aesthetic that overwrites local histories. Many buildings are indeed bland, rushed into being, built for profit rather than memory, often borrowing styles without understanding them.

And yet, I want to defend them—perhaps because I've seen the labor behind them: workers hauling steel and glass in summer heat, families buying these apartments and making them their own, filling them with small dreams and personal histories.

But a city built too faithfully on a textbook of how a "modern" city should look carries danger. It risks flattening itself, erasing memory, sweeping away existing structures and communities—something I've witnessed in Shanghai, where people are displaced at dizzying speed. It reminds me of those videos imagining Gaza's "future," full of glass hotels, perfect promenades, luxury towers—the same architectural script projected with violence, a future built on deliberate forgetting.

There's also something in Shanghai's restless aspiration, its reaching toward a Western idea of modernity. The buildings wear that longing openly; they resemble mistranslated T-shirts with mismatched slogans and wrong words—clumsy, strange, and somehow poetic in their ruptures. You can see a city mid-sentence, trying to catch up, trying to belong.