GREEN DIAMOND
GREEN DIAMOND WEBSITE ︎
“All readings are also
mis-readings, re-readings, partial readings, imposed readings, and imagined
readings of a text that is originally and finally never simply there. Just as
the world is originally fallen apart, the text is always already enmeshed in
contending practices and hopes.”
Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
It´s a love story, but a tragic one. The project Green Diamond by artist Rachele Maistrello is an imagined archive, telling a love story of reality and fiction, of human and nature, and of a factory worker and an acrobat. Throughout her practice, Maistrello has used photography as a medium of storytelling. In her current project, photographs of the acrobat Gao Yue wearing a green full-body suit are fused with cut-outs of an oversized green diamond. The photographs are extended by videos and works on paper that build an imagined archive of the Green Diamond factory, set in the late 1990s in the outskirts of Beijing. The full archive of the Green Diamond project is accessible online with sections currently exhibited at the MAXXI.
The project describes cyborgian experiments, designed to create sensory experiences of nature. The visitor discovers the factory´s workings through conversations between the acrobat Gao Yue and factory worker Li Jian Ping. The late-nineties email communication creates a sense of historical distance, leaving the visitor comfortably wandering through the image and text documents, not wanting to question their authenticity. In the story around Gao Yue, we learn about the chip experiments. We eventually discover how these experiments not only seem to slowly weaken Gao Yue physically, but further prevent her from experiencing inter-human love. The love story of Gao Yue and Li Jian Ping does not have a happy end, just like the modernist longing to control nature.
Green Diamond was developed during research trips to Beijing. It is a reflection of its hyper-urbanity and staging of modernist futures. A feeling of utopia and dystopia, that is accelerated in China´s urban environment. In Green Diamond, nature becomes a mere projection of a feeling. For centuries, technology has been developed to alter nature or make us independent of it. After entering the age of the Anthropocene we are now faced with the consequences. From wild-fires, floods to the current challenge of a pandemic, the destruction of natural habitat for human development demands structural change. Rachele Maistrello´s dystopian retrospective into a nature simulation lab that seemed a realistic vision of the future in the 90s, can be read as a commentary on a current ideological struggle on finding a new relationship towards nature and our planet. Using the ambiguity of photography, she creates a speculative a place that never was, but could have been, while raising the question of where we are heading.
Antonie Angerer
Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
It´s a love story, but a tragic one. The project Green Diamond by artist Rachele Maistrello is an imagined archive, telling a love story of reality and fiction, of human and nature, and of a factory worker and an acrobat. Throughout her practice, Maistrello has used photography as a medium of storytelling. In her current project, photographs of the acrobat Gao Yue wearing a green full-body suit are fused with cut-outs of an oversized green diamond. The photographs are extended by videos and works on paper that build an imagined archive of the Green Diamond factory, set in the late 1990s in the outskirts of Beijing. The full archive of the Green Diamond project is accessible online with sections currently exhibited at the MAXXI.
The project describes cyborgian experiments, designed to create sensory experiences of nature. The visitor discovers the factory´s workings through conversations between the acrobat Gao Yue and factory worker Li Jian Ping. The late-nineties email communication creates a sense of historical distance, leaving the visitor comfortably wandering through the image and text documents, not wanting to question their authenticity. In the story around Gao Yue, we learn about the chip experiments. We eventually discover how these experiments not only seem to slowly weaken Gao Yue physically, but further prevent her from experiencing inter-human love. The love story of Gao Yue and Li Jian Ping does not have a happy end, just like the modernist longing to control nature.
Green Diamond was developed during research trips to Beijing. It is a reflection of its hyper-urbanity and staging of modernist futures. A feeling of utopia and dystopia, that is accelerated in China´s urban environment. In Green Diamond, nature becomes a mere projection of a feeling. For centuries, technology has been developed to alter nature or make us independent of it. After entering the age of the Anthropocene we are now faced with the consequences. From wild-fires, floods to the current challenge of a pandemic, the destruction of natural habitat for human development demands structural change. Rachele Maistrello´s dystopian retrospective into a nature simulation lab that seemed a realistic vision of the future in the 90s, can be read as a commentary on a current ideological struggle on finding a new relationship towards nature and our planet. Using the ambiguity of photography, she creates a speculative a place that never was, but could have been, while raising the question of where we are heading.
Antonie Angerer
Insallation view, MAXXI Museum, 2021
“绿钻”是一家北京公司。它成立于1995年，消失于1999年中期，总部设在静海路的经济与技术开发区。据悉，绿钻公司是一家高科技研发工厂，致力于研发“绿钻感应器”——一种用钻石粉末制成微型芯片，它可以大幅增强人体对自然的感知。在虚拟隐形眼镜和超声波的帮助下，感官被精确地植入使用者的身体。使用者在一系列肢体操作后，就能感受到阳光在皮肤上停留，还有微风吹过他们脸颊的感觉。
Green Diamond is a company existed in Beijing between 1995 and mid-1999, whose headquarters were located in the Economic and Technological Development Zone on Jinghai Road. GD was a factory of highly sophisticated hi-tech technology, whose aim was the development of refined microchips in diamond powder, called "GD sensors”, capable of provoking in the human body sensations and feelings related to nature. Through a series of gestures, combined with sensors implanted in precise parts of the body and the use of virtual contact lenses and ultrasounds waves, the user of "Green Diamond" would be able to experience sensations such as the heat of the sun on their skin or feel fresh air blowing in their faces.
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尽管没有任何确切证据证明绿钻公司真实存在过，从2018年起，Rachele Maistrello在李建平的帮助下，收集到了现有所有关于绿钻公司的资料，让我们得以一窥在这里发生过的事（李建平在1994至1999年间曾是绿钻工厂的一名工人）。
Since 2018, Rachele Maistrello, thanks to Li JianPing (李建平), who was employed in the factory between 1994 and 1999, has worked to collect allavailable documents to reconstruct what happen in this company, although is still impossible to find any final proof to its existence.
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1998-1999年间，绿钻公司聘用了高跃，一名十分优秀的杂技演员，来测试新一代“绿钻感应器”的感知植入与肢体操作情况。在9个月的时间里，高跃与李建平曾是男女朋友。在交往期间，李建平记录了许多他和高跃谈话，还有高跃工作的情况。
Between 1998 and 1999, the company employed Gao Yue (高跃), one of the most promising acrobats of the school of acrobatic art in Beijing, which had the task of testing thesensors and working on the new “Green Diamond” gestures- For about nine months, Gao Yue and Li JianPing had a relationship, which resulted in Li JianPing collecting most of their conversations and a bigger number of documents from Gao Yue’s working process.
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李建平离职时，他的电脑和网络上所有的公司邮件和资料都被清除了。所幸李建平保留了几封打印的邮件，影像和照片。他用这些资料为高跃做了一本纪念他们交往一周年的小册子。这本小册子也成为了Maistrello开展对绿钻公司的研究的切入点。在近期的重新整理后，这些资料也得以重见天日。
When Li JianPing left the company, all company emails and all kinds of web documents were immediately deleted, both online and on his computer. Li JianPing, however, had kept several printed mails, videos and photographs to build a small book for Gao Yue to commemorate their first anniversiary, which became the foundation for the research into the history of Green Diamond. Thanks to a recent reevaluation of the documents, Li JianPing's archive is now available to the public.
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Rachele Maistrello 首度在I: project space 呈现李建平个人档案中的原件，其中包括这些图像和纸质资料。绿钻网站（the "Green Diamond website"）上有李建平最具有代表性影像以及一系列由原材料复原的图形设计壁纸。一些影像和复原后的“绿钻”标语是在伯纳德控制设备公司（Bernard Control Factory）员工的帮助下完成的。这是一家位于静海路的公司，它离绿钻公司原来的总部很近。“绿钻姿势”的复原也得益于伯纳德公司现任员工伍淑清的帮助。
Rachele Maistrello presents at I: project space for the first time a series of original documents from Li Jian Ping's personal archive (analogue photographs, paper documents). The "Green Diamond website" contains a rich collection of Li JianPing's most significant videos and a series of “graphics design wallpaper” reconstructed from the original materials.
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Some videos and there construction of the "Green Diamond" slogans have been reconstructed in collaboration with the workers of Bernard Control Factory, a company located in Jinghai Road, not far from the original headquarters of Green Diamond Factory. The recreation of the "Green Diamond gestures" have been possible through the efforts of Wu Shuqing, a current emplyee of Bernard Control Factory.
如果你有更多关于“绿钻工厂”的信息和材料，请联系RacheleMaistrello，李建平和I: project space.
If anyone has further information or materials they want to share about the "Green Diamond Factory", please reach out to Rachele Maistrello, Li JianPing or write to I: project space.
the project involved Bernard Control,
Social Sensitivity R&D Department
founded by Alessandro Rolandi
