Chauncy Marlowe’s Chongqing Projection provoked in me an interesting question: How many times can a place become haunted? Can the ghosts of regimes collect on it like layers of old paint? If the entire history of even a single structure could be fully grasped, what would be the combined weight of its social and cultural and economic and aesthetic influences? How many hands would we feel, of how many authors; politicians, architects, teachers, propagandists, business owners, policy-makers, money people? What would be the psychic mass of their unfinished business, their maneuverings, their genocides and war crimes, their profit seeking and their controlling? How many lives would it intersect, distort, uproot or cut short?

Some context. Marlowe’s Chongqing Projection is an AI augmented animation, layered overtop of a 3d model of a particular building in the Jiulongpo District of Chongqing. This district has for some time been home to a fine arts academy, as well as the corresponding arts community which surrounds it. Policymakers then decided that a larger, newer campus would be built, further outside the city; and as a result the community of Jiulongpo has been robbed of much of its vibrance, despite the original academy still standing. Drawing from the many mural-covered buildings which can be found there, (more and more of which are now being torn down) Marlowe’s piece reflects on the changes which can be wrought upon a place by the needs and authority of increasingly technocratic systems and policies. Combined with a musical score by collaborator FFHKS, the work uses an architectural canvas to evoke the slow and mundane violence of contemporary life.

It reminds me, of all things, of The Shining. The movie, not the book. The film adaptation is, at least according to one reading, a meditation on the weight of histories and traumas, both personal and cultural. The Overlook Hotel is, within this reading of the work, a microcosm for all of the atrocities which the colonial world, and its inheritor capitalism, was built upon. A fertile, blood soaked soil from which only further violence, and excess, and control, and trauma can grow. A place which needs a Caretaker, but which also needs that Caretaker to act within its own narrow set of needs; to be, ultimately, merely another expression of itself. Destined to escalate violently before collapsing and joining its ever-growing chorus of haunting voices, only to be replaced by yet another servant of the system.

Of course, these violent cycles are broken up; wallpapered over by moments of activity, and prosperity, and everyday living. The Overlook Hotel is, during its active season, a perfectly inviting place; assuming you are the type of person who can afford a ski holiday in the mountains. Likewise, the Jiulongpo District which Marlowe’s piece draws its inspiration from was, not too long ago, a vibrant community for students and creatives. But even in these brighter moments, the ghosts of inhuman authority lurk beneath the surface. Technocratic, and colonial, and profit-seeking motives churn below the foundations, waiting to find expression. Each new order of policymaker, even the rare few who don’t actively intend harm, will inevitably be overtaken by the ghosts of the place; towed under by a tide of blood, patiently waiting to reach the ground floor.

Ghosts are, afterall, born from unfinished business; and in a system in which all entities must, before all else, seek limitless growth, there can be no other kind. The very idea of ‘finished business’ has become anathemic to the workings of the dominant, neoliberal order. Therefore, every changing of hands, every mutation of policy, every fall of one regime and the rise of another, is another layer of psycho-economic weight upon a place's foundations. A new ghost to wander its halls. A new Caretaker for the Overlook.

Each brings its own particular elements, its own veneer of prosperity or progress, and ultimately goes out with its own unique expression of violence, (sometimes subtle, sometimes axe-wieldingly obvious) but the story is the same each time. Each new order rises and falls, disrupts and reassembles, and levels changes upon us while remaining itself part of a chaotic but fundamentally unchanging cycle of power and trauma. The scars of this cycle build up on the walls of a place like so many layers of paint.

Marlowe’s work is undoubtedly softer than The Shining, especially with the accompaniment of FFHKS’s score, but this softness in no way lessens the impact of what it says. It strips back the layers of paint, exposing the cycles of cold authority like the rings of a tree. It shows us, almost tenderly, just how haunted a place can be.