On May 17, 2023, the article "Farewell to the Museum of Part-time Workers' Culture and Art" appeared in the circle of friends of many people, and this folk museum, which has been increasingly silent in recent years, will say goodbye to everyone in the near future. Located on the outskirts of Beijing, the Migrant Workers Culture and Art Museum is the only public welfare museum founded by migrant workers in China, recording the complex experiences of migrant workers since the reform and opening up, and its rise and fall has also become a footnote in the changes of the times.
The Part-time Workers Culture and Art Museum is located in Pi Village, at the junction of urban and rural areas outside Beijing's fifth ring road. On May 20, at the farewell ceremony, Wang Dezhi, one of the founders of the museum, delivered a farewell speech to the audience.
Farewell to the museum
While working in the warehouse, Xiaohai received a WeChat message from a colleague that someone wrote "demolition" on the exterior wall of the museum. He threw his work behind and walked out of the warehouse, and the brick walls along the way were all newly written "demolished", and sneaked into the door of the museum. "As soon as it is written and demolished, it proves that the landlord has signed (agreed)," Xiaohai recalled, "and it feels like the rain is about to come." ”
The Part-time Workers Culture and Art Museum is located in Pi Village, at the junction of urban and rural areas outside Beijing's fifth ring road, and collects the common experiences and collective memories of workers from all over the country. The museum opened in 2008, the 30th year of reform and opening up, and was given various grand significance. From "blind flow" to "migrant workers in urban areas", the country's attitude towards population migration is gradually shifting.
From left to right, satellite images of Pi Village in 1992, 2002, 2008, 2018 and 2022.
Pi Cun epitomizes this grand process: around the turn of the century, the market economy gradually gained a foothold in China, and small factories sprang up in the towns and villages around Beijing, and local villagers converted their houses for rent, attracting many migrant workers. Among the workers who came to Pi Village were several young people who had been working for many years and pursued art, hoping that the migrant workers would tell their history.
"The 30 years of reform and opening up coincide with the 30 years since the movement of workers, which is particularly commemorative, and we built a museum in this context." At the farewell ceremony last Saturday (May 20), Wang Dezhi, one of the museum's founders, talked about the experience. "Those of us who are museums know very well why people pay attention to us, our country's economy is growing rapidly, workers have made a great contribution, we are doing this on behalf of the workers' group, everyone is paying attention to this group."
Outside the Museum of Part-time Culture and Art, a small farewell ceremony.
They designed a small farewell ceremony, and in front of the museum, the workers of the literary group recited their poems "Di Ding Flower" (a small and inconspicuous purple flower common on Beijing's roadsides) and Li Bai's "Difficult to Walk", and several close friends shared their experiences with the museum. Finally, a documentary filmmaker and guitarist invited everyone to sing "Farewell," which ended with laughter, applause and cheers.
Wang Dezhi said that he is a person without a sense of ceremony, and he does not hold weddings when he gets married, and it is the emotional Xiao Haili who mainly holds farewell ceremonies, but they did not expect that so many people would come to the scene. Dozens of spectators gathered around a small clearing, and not far behind, several girls stood in an open-air pool more than one meter high, and Xiaohai climbed up a higher oil drum with her mobile phone.
A woman in the media industry hired two photographers to document the museum's final scene. Coincidentally, the two photographers rented a house in Pi Village, but neither had heard of the Migrant Museum. "I didn't hear anyone talk about it when I went outside, and I passed by when I went for a run (but I never noticed it), and it was integrated with the surroundings." The photographer said. The girl has been following the museum for many years, and she picked up the conversation, "The world is still very divided, and you can't enter it without understanding it." ”
Outside the field, an airplane skimmed overhead.
The new group of workers has its own culture
The rise and fall of Pi Village and the cultural activities of the workers rooted in it have a clear historical context.
In 2002, many of them, Sun Heng, Wang Dezhi and other workers established the "Working Youth Art Troupe", most of them "fled" from their depressed hometown to Beijing because of their artistic pursuits, and because they could only work and wander in Beijing because they did not meet their talents, these wandering experiences became their initial creative inspiration. When performing at construction sites, factories and communities, they witnessed the common dilemmas faced by workers: identity discrimination, wage protection, physical and mental loneliness, lack of learning opportunities, etc. Several young people decided to respond to the demands of these workers and became a non-profit organization Workers' Home to provide services.
In 2005, a private school for migrant children, Tongxin Experimental School, landed in Pi Village, and the school's start-up capital came from the 75,000 yuan royalties earned by the "Working Youth Art Troupe" from selling an album a year earlier. The workers' home also moved into Pi Village, where students attend classes during the day and night classes for workers.
A corner of the Concentric Experimental School, which closed its doors at the beginning of the epidemic.
In 2007, they rented an abandoned glass factory near the school, which a year later became a museum of part-time cultural art. They call themselves "new workers": unlike the old workers of state-owned enterprises, the new workers are migrant workers who have come to the cities from the countryside; Different from the title of migrant workers, the title of new workers emphasizes the change of status, and those who participate in the construction of cities should have dignity and should enjoy the same public treatment.
These are the years of rapid development of the new workers' culture, and with the support of many parties, this courtyard has successively built a number of cultural facilities such as "New Workers' Theater", "Workers' Theater" and "Workers' Library". The most famous event is the Spring Festival Gala, which has been held for many years, with actors from front-line workers from all over the world, and the show is also related to their own experiences.
"The new group of workers emerged with the industrialization process of the country and actively played its due role. Although we have a huge population of hundreds of millions, we are the typical 'silent majority'. Wang Dezhi wrote in a recent memoir, "Producing our own culture, identifying with our own class, returning the essence of labor, respecting the value of labor, and establishing the subjectivity of the working class is the direction of our work." ”
It is precisely because of their existence that Pi Village became synonymous with "new worker culture" for a while.
Farewell ceremony (it is Xiaohai who wears the hat).
In 2016, Xiaohai went north to Beijing. He left home at the age of 15 and worked in various places for more than a decade, and his last job before coming to Beijing was at an electronics factory in Jiaxing, where he inserted resistors, motors and buzzers into the circuit board of the soymilk machine. To survive in this oppressive environment, everyone needs to have a way to self-extricate themselves, and Xiaohai's choice is to write lyrics, "worry about what to do in the Chinese music scene in the factory." Xiaohai sent private letters to many musicians, Zhang Chu was the most enthusiastic, under his introduction, Xiaohai met everyone in the workers' home, and he decided to come to Beijing to pursue his musical dream for the last time.
When I arrived in Beijing, Xiaohai went straight to Pi Village and walked into the Part-time Museum for the first time. "I was very shocked after reading it, I suffered before, those grievances, there is actually a museum here to record such a sad past." He said.
Recording and solace
The Part-time Workers Culture and Art Museum in Pi Village is not the only museum in China with this theme, but its unique exhibits and temperament make this folk museum stand out. A report in the Southern Metropolis Daily in 2012 compared the difference between the two, the Migrant Museum does not avoid the crux of the times, does not deliberately pursue the story to warm the heart, and some exhibits are blunt about the painful experience of workers, which resonates with many visitors.
Various part-time work certificates collected by the Museum of Part-time Workers' Culture and Art.
The museum's exhibit No. 001 is Wang Dezhi's temporary residence card, which is also the most sent by workers when the museum collects exhibits. When the time came to the end of the 90s of the 20th century, the wave of migrant workers who could not be "blocked" made city managers shift from restrictions to guidance, but migrant workers still need to apply for identity proof: temporary residence permits.
It is a tangible wall, and if a migrant worker fails to show his or her documents during the inspection, a migrant worker can be fined, taken in, or even sent home, which many workers are terrified. It was not until the Sun Zhigang case in 2003 that the national attention was raised, and a series of management policies around the floating population were adjusted one after another, and temporary residence permits became history. For many years, museum managers would always mention the phrase when dealing with visitors, "Sun Zhigang died as a migrant worker for us." Most of the first-time workers can tell a difficult experience, but many people only know Sun Zhigang's name at this time.
It was also at this time that Xiao Hai learned about Sun Zhigang, and he was also touched by a number of letters in the museum's collection. One of the letters was written on July 24, 1993, and the owner of the letter, who worked in a toy factory in the south, repeatedly expressed her longing for her parents, asked them to cherish their bodies, and hoped that they would write back to tell about the situation at home. Four months later, she and 87 other co-workers died in the factory fire. On a nearby panel, the museum combs through years of fire accidents under the name "History Repeats Itself."
Letters from the collection of the Museum of Part-time Culture and Art.
"Many letters are very touching to read, recording the real state of existence of a generation, we do not deny it, the record of the lives of these ordinary people is a consolation in itself." Xiaohai said. At the farewell ceremony, he recited his poem "The Last Working Museum", which he described as a realistic wasteland and an ideal test field.
This was a miracle built on the ruins
This process of construction and ruins
How similar it is to the lives of co-workers.
instability
In recent years, with the adjustment of management policies, the trend of population migration has gradually changed. Pi Village and Jinzhan Township, where it is located, have adjusted their development plans at the same time, and the work of demolishing violations has also been put back on the agenda after three years of the epidemic.
News of the demolition has been circulating in Pi Village for several years, and the precarious state of affairs has put the museum's operations in a dilemma. The last time the museum added displays was a few years ago, and seeing that there were fewer and fewer schools for migrant children, Wang Dezhi felt that something needed to be added. More ideas gradually cooled as they awaited demolition, and Wang had envisioned an exhibit with hundreds of hard hats of different colors to form an art installation that showed differences in status and rank, and as for new phenomena such as new formats of delivery workers and couriers, small white-collar workers who moved to urban villages, he could only hope that he would have the opportunity to complete them later.
Another constraint is the operating capital that has long plagued museums. In the early days of the museum, they had regular funding from public welfare organizations, but with the adjustment of the project and the tightening of policies, the funds that the museum could raise sharply decreased, and it was difficult to cover the annual operating costs of hundreds of thousands of yuan, and to this day, they still owe tens of thousands of yuan in rent. The museum used to have a resident docent and a fixed explanation process, but now it can only ensure that the door is open for everyone to visit freely, and if you happen to meet the audience, Wang Dezhi will take it around.
The three years of the new crown are another reality test for all offline exhibition halls, life is stop-and-go, and the group has not promoted the part-time museum anymore. In recent years, many visitors have never heard of the major historical events displayed in the museum, and even fewer are willing to learn more about the new group of workers for a long time, which makes Wang feel like a world away. At the farewell ceremony, he gave an example, "In the past ten years, the enthusiasm of college students (for visiting) has dropped sharply, and it has been much less, and we don't know what caused the gap between classes to deepen a bit, and we don't know how to break it." ”
At the farewell ceremony, Wang Dezhi told the audience about the history of running the museum.
One hot morning, Xiaohai took Nandu reporters to see the warehouse where he worked. The museum's demolition grace was until early June, but construction of the warehouse has already begun. This is the season when swallows fly from the south to Beijing, the roof of the warehouse has been lifted, the little swallow still insists on building a nest on the steel beam, Xiaohai is useless to persuade, "It's a pity to build a spring." ”
The museum is about to be demolished, but Wang Dezhi has repeatedly stressed that he is very optimistic. They are going to transport the exhibits to a warehouse in Pinggu for temporary storage, hoping to re-exhibit them one day. After the tweet "Farewell to the Museum of Migrant Workers' Culture and Art" was issued, friends of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions contacted and hoped to preserve some exhibits that reflected the new workers' culture; The village party secretary of Pi Village asked him to write another report and send it to the township to get some support for the museum; Some companies have come to it and want to make it into an online museum; Another private museum came to negotiate the acceptance of exhibits...
Wang Dezhi and his colleagues are also trying new projects, hoping to provide stable financial support for the museum's operation in the future. "Our team itself has to work hard, the new workers objectively speaking, for many years, the needs of this group exist, our work can continue, so we will continue to create conditions to provide services to everyone." He said to the audience.
After singing "Farewell", the musicians left the Museum of Part-time Culture and Art.
Written by/photographed: Nandu reporter Song Chenghan Guo Ruomei from Beijing