VERDICKT Franky

The South Street Village

Belgique

2015

“Cities, as in dreams, are built out of desires and fears”, writes Italo Calvino in The
invisible Cities.
Nanjiecun (“The South Street Village”) continues to be run on Maoist egalitarian lines. The project shows the only Maoist village in China where the people are mere background actors in a giant epic story. A place where the community is the producer of their own happiness, where people receive free housing, electricity and receive free healthcare. The Nanjiecun village promotes itself as a brand for real communist ideology in the land of Mao Zedong. The project was created in cooperation with the inhabitants of this village.

About the artist

FRANKY VERDICKT was born in Zel, Belgium, in 1971. From 2003 to 2007, he studied at Hogeschool Sint Lukas in Brussels. Since 2007, he’s been member of PHOTOLIMITS, a Belgium based platform for documentary photography.