Kunming Chronicles
2025-ongoing
Psychogeographic map as film script
Photo documentation
Kunming Chronicles is an ongoing documentary project about a community of amateur fossil hunters in Kunming, China. The work explores the intersections of urban development, geological time, and informal knowledge. Through an experimental documentary combining on-site video and hand-drawn animation, the work explores how fossils circulate through systems of exchange outside formal scientific or commercial structures.
I first encountered this community while joining fossil-hunting trips around Kunming. Many of these expeditions take place in landscapes shaped by stalled real-estate development. One of the most striking sites lies within a partially abandoned housing project, where excavation exposed layers of sedimentary rock later identified by paleontologists as part of the Guanshan biota, a Cambrian fossil deposit. The same geological conditions that preserved ancient marine life also complicated large-scale construction, creating an unexpected overlap between speculative urban expansion and deep geological history.
Although formal paleontological research at the site largely ceased after the publication of Guanshan Biota, the book continues to circulate among amateur fossil hunters as an informal field guide. Community members use its maps and descriptions to relocate fossil-bearing areas, often making discoveries of their own. This movement of knowledge—from institutional science into vernacular practice—forms one of the project’s central concerns.
The work focuses on the social life of fossils within this community. Fossils are not treated solely as commodities or scientific objects, but are gifted, traded, collectively identified, and incorporated into personal collections. During these trips, strangers and friends alike offered me fossils they had found. Hunters share photographs of discoveries online, comparing specimens against paleontological documentation to identify trilobites, Cricocosmia, and rarer species. These practices suggest alternative relationships to value, ownership, and stewardship that do not fit neatly within either market logic or state-centered models of collective property.
The project is shaped by the collision of multiple temporalities: the accelerated pace of urbanization and speculative development in contemporary China, alongside the vast timescale embedded within Cambrian fossils. Kunming’s unfinished developments and exposed sedimentary layers become sites where these temporalities converge.