Chinese re-education and punishment camp
On the road to Ghulja, a city in China’s Xinjiang autonomous region close to the border with Kazakhstan, lies one of 381 (!) internment camps where mostly Uyghur Muslims are ‘re-educated’. The map shows Camp Mongolkure as the crow flies and was made for the installation ‘Investigating Xinjiang’s Network of Detention Camps’ for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Because of this map, the Chinese delegation stayed away at the opening. The research for this project was organised from Rotterdam by Alison Killing, a British architect and investigative journalist. This narrative drawing is based on satellite photos, United Nations reports, 3D modelling, analysis of Chinese prison building regulations, clandestine snapshots and testimonies from former prisoners. Passing through the gate marked ‘Education is the passport to the future’, the card reader enters a penal camp where all rooms have cameras, men and women perform separate forced labour in factory halls, everyone must study the teachings of the Chinese Communist Party, women are regularly sterilised and so on.
J. Rothuizen, Mongolkure Camp 2023, Amsterdam 2023. Jan Rothuizen collection, 50 x 106 cm.
