How Letters Mark The City

Signs are the markers of a city and need to be in the place they are marking

- Marco D’Eramo

Signs are the markers of a city and need to be in the place they are marking

Text by Marco D’Eramo

The World (2004), one of the finest Chinese films by director Jia Zhangke, tells the story of a group of young people newly arrived from the countryside who work as hostesses and guards in a theme park near Beijing, called Beijing World Park.

It attracts a million and a half visitors a year with exact scale reproductions of the world’s most famous monuments. The film grips viewers by taking them into the modest lives of these young peasants, working shifts now at the Taj Mahal, now at the Eiffel Tower, touring visitors to the Tower of Pisa, the Kremlin, the Pyramids of Giza, and commuting from the Statue of Liberty to Borobudur Temple.

The question you have to ask yourself is why the Chinese tourists who visit the World Park want to go and see the real world as soon as they can afford to? How is it that the one visit does not exclude the other, and even somehow prepares the way for it?