CROSSING FIELDS

Due to obsolete libraries in Beijing, bookstores function as an open source of knowledge. This attracts people to spend their free time in gigantic bookstore complexes. But as the store management tolerates it, people read the books inside the store, instead of purchasing them. Taking into account the amount of reading time of an average book, the reading people’s private use of space is becoming prevalent to the commercial activity in the store.

Domke is interested in the anarchic use of space and the depiction of stasis evolving within the situation. Winding its way through the statue-like readers the camera captures with close and intimate images the ambiguity of their presence. Ignorant to the order of commercial space the reading people focus on their own purpose converting the space to a hybrid of opposed polarities. They work like palimpsests on which the scrambled concepts of identity and space are ceaselessly rewritten.