This multisensory exhibition presents situated stories of intertwined flows of people and land around an ordinary Chinese village. Visual, sonic, and bodily encounters reveal hidden transformations in rural homes and landscapes that sustain the floating labour force behind urbanisation, while tracing an evolving practice across architecture, anthropology, filmmaking, and performance. A dry stone house foundation at 1:1 scale on Bedford Square materialises village conditions within central London, hosting performances, food-sharing, and a living garden. In the AA Gallery, a walk-around screening of the Ripple Ripple Rippling film trilogy joins drawings, photographs, and field footage in an expanded multimedia story-telling. Over the past decade, Ripple Ripple Rippling has become a living project. From architectural documentation to participant observation to performative improvisation to collective happening, the project is a long-term commitment to a place, its marginalised community and their agency, resistance and complicity, all rooted in precarity.

Field-0 trials situated, sensorial approaches to dissecting planetary interconnectedness, while grounding their work in communities. Through fieldwork, following drifting bodies—be they sand, water or migrant workers, the practice attunes to material flows, planetary scales, intergenerational time, and the many forms of life entangled in these processes. Field practice, for them, is relation-oriented: drawing out relations, entering into them with care, and moving towards repair and reciprocity. Initiated by Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan, field-0 operates at the intersection of architecture, anthropology, art, and filmmaking. Their recent exhibitions include the solo shows How Much Wattage Is One Handbreadth of Water at Storefront for Art and Architecture (New York, 2025) and Ripple Ripple Rippling at the Architectural Association (London, 2024), as well as participation in the 2025 Singapore Biennale. Their film work received the Architecture Short Film Award at the Milano Design Film Festival (2024) and the Best Short Film at the Venice Architecture Film Festival (2023). Cheng was awarded the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s 2023 Wheelwright Prize for Tracing Sand, and received two commendations from the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) President’s Awards for Research in 2020 and 2018. Her work has been exhibited as part of Critical Zones at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2020–22), Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2019) and Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), among others. She currently teaches at the Royal College of Art in London. Chen is an artist, independent filmmaker, anthropologist and UK-registered architect. She previously worked at Heatherwick Studio in London on high-profile projects, including the Changi Airport Terminal 5 in Singapore, Google Gradient Canopy Headquarters in California, the Bund Finance Centre in Shanghai, and Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre in Leeds, UK.

Mengfan Wang is an independent theatre director and choreographer, with training in History of Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, and Dance Studies at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz, Cologne. Seeking to explore performative expressions of ordinary people, her dance theatre practice engages middle-aged women and children through a collaborative rework of daily acts and recently focuses on ageing bodies by working with retired ballet dancers. Wang is selected as “Dance Hopeful (Hoffnungsträger)” by German dance magazine tanz in its yearbook 2018. Her dance works have been invited to VIE Festival Bologna, Beijing Fringe Festival, Wuzhen Theater Festival, among others. Commissioned by the Centre Pompidou and the West Bund Museum Shanghai, her latest work Narrative Fountain was shown as part of Women in Motion 2023. Wang’s artist residencies span across Shanghai, Berlin, Copenhagen and Zurich, including working with Theatre HORA supported by the Swiss Arts Council.