2012
Ye Shanghai is a project by Roberto Paci Dalò that includes a filmic work, an exhibition, an audio-video installation, a record and live performances. The project shows the unexplored history of the Shanghai Ghetto. The city of Shanghai was the last port open to Jews fleeing the Nazi occupation. The Jewish refugees went to a ghetto in the district of Hongkou, an area of Shanghai that had been occupied by Japan. As Ye Shanghai shows, three cultures unexpectedly found themselves living together in a small area of Shanghai: Hebrew, Chinese and Japanese.
Ye Shanghai is a work based on very rare audio and video materials from the years between 1933 and 1949. The artist Roberto Paci Dalò finds, at the British Film Institute in London, a testimony of the unknown “Shanghai Ghetto”, a multi-ethnic territory located in the small district of Hongkou. About 23,000 Jewish refugees escaping from Europe during and after the Nazi occupation found protection here.
To support the vision of the extraordinary and very rare images, the moods of time resonate through a famous Chinese song of the thirties, The Nights of Shanghai, interpreted by Zhou Xuan (1918-1957) and used by the artist as the leitmotif of the work.
Roberto Paci Dalò decomposes and reconstructs the Chinese hit, creating electroacoustic fragments and samples. At last he adds his own clarinets. The album of the work has been published by Marsèll in 2014.
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