A Pile of Ghosts

A Pile of Ghosts (2021) is an artistic hybrid film in-between fiction and documentation created through the process of the art-based research project Of Haunted Spaces. This research on Chinese ghost cities was a journey of exploring locations and looking- ing for protagonists for the film that would embody the urbanization processes that surfaced as the phenomena of haunted cities by the spectral production of capitalism. As the filmmaking process goes, settings and castings are staged to re-enact situations observed during the field trips undertaken in many parts of China. The search for the unknown narrative keeps modifying and displacing the semantics of the film script. Therefore, in A Pile of Ghosts, a discursive space creates the line between documentary and fiction in which facts, analyses, and references are fused. This is not only to scrutinize the social reality and to render its discourse but also to foster an aesthetic dimension by reexamining the convention of filmmaking and its representations. It is the method of a performative documentary to enact and re-enact situations and sites to reveal the contradictory characteristics of global urbanization. The research process is transformed into making the film from field research for scriptwriting and casting. The protagonists appear in changing roles as construction workers, real estate agents, and investors to enact the realities of capitalism. On the threshold between the visible and the invisible, the haunting ghost of capitalism is materializing in the poiesis of the film, lurking in the limbo zone of fiction, reality, and the performative.