1 hour 50mins
8.5.2025
Shanghai, China
Instruction
Using bandages to wind a strut - one of the supporting structures beneath the shelter where you are standing - first you have to apply povidone-iodine for disinfection. More povidone-iodine is better, as we do not know when and how the wound was caused. Make sure the entire surface is covered, no matter if it's raining, windy, storming, or bugs biting due to the hot season. No worry, an abundant supply of bandages will be offered. Try your best to overcome the limit of your height, since the strut cannot move, giving you enough time to try again, again, and again. You must begin before the sun comes up, because you are in a corner of the metropolis, it is the best time to begin bandaging. Please remember, be resilient, do not lean on the strut no matter how exhausted you are, it’s your patient. The city has been constantly spitting out the steel, there is no sense of a first-aid golden hour in this case, only whether you make it or not.
To cure a rusty strut is to compromise with the body’s height, the weathering, a dark echo from the metal, a void between every single two repeated action. The body bandages the strut, one of the shelter’s supporting bones, beneath which it moves. Around it, the entire shelter was a contemporary gallery that is now abandoned and out of use, located in an area which is now waiting and shifting from a leading art district to an integrated hub of commerce and technology. Fortunately, unlike most of the surrounding buildings of its kind that have already been demolished, this one still stands, at least for now.
Standing right in the narrow triangle space that the strut formed, the body feels secure, no matter what the strut will be like tomorrow - a ruin, a bolt, or a sigh when it becomes an ash. Later, the body brings bandage, brush and povidone-iodine, hoping to offer a cover for the rust, until it is completely cured. The body is drowning. What haunts here, above the ground, is the impulse to hold on, to remain, to cure and save it, so desperately that, even as the wind, sun, and rain are aging the body, making it fragile and powerless, it persists, though destined to collapse.
It is outside an abandoned building, a container-like gallery supported by two diagonal steel struts behind. The triangular design provides stability......
no noticeable change
the top bandage loosen and slipped down
no noticeable change
sii
someone retied the loosen bandage
another part of the bandage slipped off.
the retied part remained.
muds and ashes appeared on the bottom,
some were attached on the surface while others were embedded into the seam of bandages.
someone retied the slipped bandage found on the 26th. knot below was the previous one retied on the 16th.
the surface of bandage became sticker, changes were barely perceptible, but still noticeable through touching.
shot right after a rainstorm
muds on the bottom looked much clearer
some knots came loose