A Pile of Ghosts

Raidel’s film, which forms the preliminary conclusion to her comprehensive research project, Of Haunted Spaces, takes the stage-like qualities of the settings as the starting point for a puzzling game. A Pile of Ghosts shows construction workers and real estate brokers at work—in authentic and also staged settings, in casting scenes and in changing roles. The so-called reality, at the same time, turns out to be increasingly porous, also hard lines of rupture become increasingly apparent in the retort-like surroundings. At a construction site, instructions can be found to not “shit” behind the building. And in the tumbledown “Swallow Hotel” in the hills of Chongqing, amidst persistent noises the dandyesque hotel owner Charles defies the turbo-capitalist urbanization process.