51 Personae

The Village of Proof is a fairy tale set in an extremely well-organised farming community where uncertainties are minimised at all costs and traditions are paramount. When little Zulma is born and starts to sow seeds of doubt with her unsure-making eyes, the villagers of Proof are not inclined to tolerate this.

This poetry collection brings together over three decades of work by Sue Doro, a U.S. blue-collar worker, poet, and labor activist whose writing emerged from lived experience on factory floors and in working-class communities.

Doro worked as a machinist in the industrial Midwest, and her poems are deeply rooted in the rhythms, struggles, and solidarities of laboring life.

Revisiting her work today is also a way of revisiting the legacy of social movements in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the powerful moment when feminist consciousness took shape in the life of a worker and a mother. Her poetry reflects not only political awakening but also the urgency and necessity of writing as a form of self-articulation and resistance.

As an independent voice outside academic literary circles, Doro’s work resists ornament and abstraction, speaking instead with clarity, immediacy, and conviction. Her poems foreground the dignity of labor, the tensions of identity, and the complexities of survival within industrial and social structures.

This collection invites readers to rediscover the significance of writing from lived experience, and to reflect on how poetry can carry memory, struggle, and solidarity across time.

This book includes three stories from a Tibetan village in Shangri-La, Yunnan Province, China, collected by the artist Susuo through a friend he made there. The narrator is a young Tibetan who received higher education in the city before returning to work in the countryside and towns. The stories are based on his childhood memories.

Susuo created animations for these three stories and developed this book based on those animations. The book is a collection of paintings using various media materials she employed during her fieldwork.

Listening to mogwai’s “punk rock”, I pondered on how comics and rock music are the same. For a majority of people, comics like such are perhaps just boring doodles and obtuse content. Or even like twitchy, discomforting noises. For a few, on the other hand, comics are stories that touch the deepest parts of our hearts. Illustrations draw our lingering sights into unfathomable wonder.

Since I do not have the habit of writing scripts beforehand, my illustrations, the images I describe, and the direction of the story would often loose control. In this world encapsulated on paper, I would feel that it is someone other than I who is holding the pen. Roaming the towns alongside Kaka, I am enveloped into a profound and absurd sense of powerlessness that I inescapably fall into. Not knowing where the end is, I traverse along my instincts. In this moment, the story tells itself.

Invited by 51 Personae Project, Feile, a female architect was invited to document, in the form of observation-based documentary comics, and released the "51 Tan" (Stalls) series on the WeChat of the Power Station of Ar. This invitation turned her into a street recorder, squatting on the streets, learning the visible "ways of resolution" and "ways of coping" in street survival.

51 Personae: Tarwewijk is a trilingual (Dutch, Chinese, English) booklet of writing and images, based on solitary walks through a small neighborhood. It originated from Chen Yun’s visit to ook_ in August 2019. ook_ is a space opened up by mariëlle verdijk and reinaart vanhoe in their home and community in Rotterdam. After this 24-hour stay by Chen Yun, mariëlle became deeply interested in the 51 Personae project and suggested doing something together.

In the autumn and winter of 2019, mariëlle began emailing Chen Yun small notes about her neighbourhood, Tarwewijk, where she had moved a year earlier. She wrote about all the small things she observed such as people, facilities, plants, houses, and public spaces, as she walked around the neighbourhood and surrounding areas.

The hole in the wall in our bedroom was plugged up again the next day by a pipe. I wanted to take a picture of it, but I forgot about it and never got the chance. I wondered what would have happened if the hole in the wall had never been plugged. That’s why I drew “Hole in the Wall”. The discussion between the boy who likes to say “it seems to be” and the mysterious naked man seems to say that the concept of “normal people” is not good, but I think that’s not quite right, although it’s not quite wrong either. What do “normal” and “person” mean, anyway? I don’t know. The room in the comic definitely doesn’t feel like the room Caya and I live in. It was cramped and dark, and therefore a bit silent, reminding me of the 15-square-meter rental house in Shipai Village, Guangzhou, where I lived for a while.

A remarkably inexpensive second-hand machine produces quite a magical effect. After finishing a cigarette or while smoking, after taking that first sip of coffee of the day, I might feel the urge to take a shit—a sensation that something is coming. But it doesn’t happen every single time. One day, after inhaling a significant amount of secondhand smoke—in a setting where more than three people were chatting—I sensed something approaching. I fell silent and waited. I waited all night, but it didn’t come. The next day, I woke up normally: urinated, smoked, defecated, and began scrolling through things that required little effort to view. I’ve been rather fond of these lately. Meituan has already refunded me forty quid for scrolling through short videos. Then it came.

Carmen is a story about secondhand smoke.

Produced using offset printing to simulate the effect of dot matrix printing (circa 2003/2012, STAR NX-500 / Epson LQ-595K) on carbonless copy paper. Through this process, a relatively low-cost method recreates the obsolete yet strangely compelling mechanical texture of such machines.

This story comes from a dream—about how a poor, failed man lost his closest companion because of his own mistake.

Deep Simulator is a cyberdrama-novel with layers of stories generated through reader interaction. Based on a namesake video game, it is a collaborative experiment between artists aaajiao and the author Ag, which began during the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020. The story stems from themes related to player identity, the multiverse and the breaking down of inter-dimensional walls. The exposure of karmic chains, the ideological rupture between various movements, melancholia, death, the final struggle, accelerationism, the inability to distinguish between the real and the imaginary, all foreshadow an ominous sense of change looming ahead.

51 Personae presents 51 dramas that feature 51 real-life scenarios, and so it provides 51 stories—though not answers—expanding the possibilities of the 11th Shanghai Biennale: Why Not Ask Again: Arguments, Counterarguments, and Stories. While arguments and reasoning do not always come up with rhetoric sufficient to accurately reflect one’s contemplation, stories are embedded with uncertainty, diversity, and vitality, as is indicated in the proverb: “There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes”. From the stories of others, one enters their lives, causing a reflection on one’s own life, and in this sense, the stories of others are linked to ours.

51 Personae engages life, emotions, common sense, nature, history, economics, society, culture, and art, responding to and exceeding our speculations. It takes its chance in the way individuals present their dramas to become mobile power stations. 51 Personae, like the weight of human life on the streets of a city, is ephemeral and enduring.