Nadine Stijns, FLOATING POPULATION, 2013

“In the early 1980s, upon the opening up of China’s economy under Deng Xiaoping, farmers left their hometowns seeking work in China’s developing cities as a response to the resulting agricultural reforms. These people from China’s vast rural areas are referred to as the ‘floating population’.
This publication is a documentation of several projects shot during various travels to China between 2009 and 2013.
By visually assembling photographs, video stills and photographed objects like textiles, rubber shoes, construction materials, a sock, piles of postcards and posters and more I investigate this stream of migrant laborers. As tactility, materials and structure are important in my work I decided to make the page compositions by hand. I printed all the photos, put them on the studio floor together with the products and took photos of that assemblage again.” – Nadine Stijns