In occasion of the launch of the 9th Shanghai Biennale Reactivation, the Shanghai Inter-City Pavilions’ Project focuses on the interesting connections and energy exchanges between people and cultures which, in nowadays globalized world, are more likely to be identified within local communities rather than in national contexts. By some means, cities are metaphorical individuals that, with their particular “temper”, populate their countries.

Shanghai in its quest to become an international city, considered by many a ‘foreign” city in China, can find its own identity through the confrontation with other places, harbors and friends, that had portrayed the contemporary status of art not in a generic way, but in the punctual and relevant projects presented in each pavilion. So, despite this general and global tendency of amalgamation and simplification, the City Pavilions’ Project stands as a memento of independence of the extraordinary local. The individuality as an irreplaceable fragment of a bigger pictures that, with no pretentions of representing the whole, gives a glimpse of it, suggesting one of the many possible interpretations as a verse of a much more complicated poem.