See visions of China on a wall in Chinatown

By NANCY RAMSEY

Whenever Solange Fabiao, a Brazilian-born artist living in New York, travels to a new city, the first thing she does is hire a car and take to the streets with a mini-DV camera.

From 6:30 to 11 on Thursday night, Fabiao's latest project, a 40-minute video of Nanning and Shanghai, is scheduled to be projected in a loop running onto an exterior wall on the corner of Canal and Centre Sts. The China-in-Chinatown video is the second installment of "Transitio" - "That's Latin for transit, transmission, transition," Fabiao says.

She hopes it will become a 10-city project. Last year, she projected a video of Broadway from Washington Heights to Wall Street onto an abandoned movie theater building in central Beirut.

"What's special about the project is the relationship between places," says Fabiao, who has a quick, passionate way of talking. "Each city has a different energy, and it's about capturing that energy."

Questions of what's real and what's virtual, of the conscious and unconscious, of time and space, intrigue Fabiao. "What is the possibility that I can simultaneously experience Shanghai and New York City?" she muses.

The work is "about the dynamic of movement and moment and passage through a place," she adds. Moving along the streets of Nanning and Shanghai, the camera is a virtual hummingbird buzzing about, alighting on a colorful fruit stand; on two men eating a snack, who look up, a little startled at being filmed; on an older woman waiting for the bus in the rain, her face obscured by a bright umbrella.

Fabiao's choice to show the video on the street as opposed to in a gallery "opens up the audience completely," says Sarah Herda, the director of Storefront for Art and Architecture, an alternative art space, which will host a reception for Fabiao on Thursday. The video is scheduled to be projected each evening until Oct. 31.

"This is for everybody who happens upon it," Herda continues. "The experience will be whatever you bring to it that day."

Last week, on a rainy day in Chinatown, Fabiao was surveying the site: a flat white wall, at a slight angle, visible from several blocks. She gave an approving nod, as she got into a taxi. It'll work. "I was lucky," she said.

Originally published on October 16, 2005