A New Silk Road (2014-ongoing)
In 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping announced the most ambitious infrastructure project the world has ever known - and the most expensive: the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI). This new ‘Silk Road’ foresees to build a global infrastructure system that will permanently change the world order and has an expected cost of more than a trillion dollars.
The enormous undertaking, created to stimulate economic growth across Asia and beyond, will someday connect sixty-five percent of the world’s population. It introduces a brand-new form of spatial planning and nobody knows yet how and if it will bring local communities a prosperous future, or if there’s a tangible risk of increased social inequality.
Since 2014, Davide Monteleone started tracing stretches of some of the land routes, from China to Central Asia and Russia, to document the scale of this unprecedented plan and the way it will impact local communities and the environment. ‘A New Silk Road’ is a story about the fragile assimilation process between human beings and an emerging superpower, about the opaqueness of economic strategies and the consequences of exercising global power through financial, transport and logistics structures. Monteleone paints a living portrait of the global and local consequences of China’s undertaking, in order to put faces and experiences to the civil societies who find themselves affected by Beijing’s growing influence.
Because of the underlying geopolitical nature of any country’s ambitions of international influence, this work interconnects with some of the most urgent global issues of our time: soft power, cultural integration, environmental conservation, inclusive economic development, international power and fragmented sovereignty.
