Duncan Campbell

Maeve Brennan

Ho Tzu Nyen

Luke Fowler

Miyu Hosoi

Shimabuku

Yves Klein famously said that his first artwork was the blue sky. He was lying on the beach in Nice with friends when he claimed it. In the ensuing decades the colour came to represent limitlessness in his work and the capacity to grasp the immaterial. Blue coursed through monochromatic paintings, sculptures and the new hue he developed, known as International Klein Blue.

A static field of this intense ultramarine blue is the only image in Derek Jarman’s 

 (1993), his final film before he died from AIDS-related complications. He loved the colour, and as he began to lose his vision towards the end of his life he experienced flashes of blue in one eye. In the film’s soundtrack

 Jarman and others read excerpts from his writings, recall his art and contemplate mortality. The film has become one of the most vivid accounts of its time, for commemorating the too many lives lost to AIDS and for turning dying into art. The boundlessness of Klein’s blue here became a means to suspend Jarman’s artistic vision between life and afterlife. ‘I have walked behind the sky,’ the artist says at one point.

The film and video works in this programme also take loss and the aftermath of disaster – large and small – as material. Like seizing the sky or giving grief a colour, each piece finds a way to visualize emotional and material effects that are otherwise hard to see.

 as well as a homage to Jarman. Made during a residency in Prospect Cottage – Jarman’s storied home in Dungeness, on the Kent coastline – Fowler’s 16mm film emulates aspects of 

’s soundtrack and draws from Jarman’s earlier Super-8 experiments, particularly his very first film, 

 (1971), which documented his then home-studio from inside and out. The chime of a bell commences both films. Like the original, 

 is overlaid with fragmented voices, including Jarman’s, here combined with ambient sounds of the house and its surroundings: groaning floorboards, the force of wind against walls, waves sweeping across sand. Instead of the sustained blue, Fowler creates a vivid portrait of the cottage, of things Jarman made and could see while alive: spectacular sunsets, his iconic garden, his belongings, his art, even his writing playfully etched across numerous surfaces around the house. ‘Dear hinney beast I love you. when your in a growler stew your looka eyes suit you F.B.’, reads one such message scratched into clear resin. Anyone who has trekked to Dungeness to see Prospect Cottage knows that it embodies Jarman’s artistic vision. In 

, the site is further animated, the steady blue swapped for new ways to see the artist through an archive of his life.

has a contemplative pace and a remove that is distinct from what confronts us daily. At present, so much life comes at us via handheld screens, too fast, too hard and too brutal; a constant scroll of not-good-news that produces an atmosphere of unease and threat. Peter C. Van Wyck, in his writing on nuclear war and waste, wrote that the twentieth century authored ‘unspeakable’ events that eluded our capacity for expression or description. 

 How do artists find form when the unspeakable appears to have accelerated?

 (2024), Miyu Hosoi answers the question wordlessly with sensation and sound. The video documents a journey to the Hirono Thermal Power Station in Fukushima through the disorienting perspective of an iPhone attached to the body of an unseen solo traveller. The power station, which was flooded and severely damaged by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, also supplies a good share of electricity to Tokyo, where the artist is based. 

 begins at night: through the grainy darkness, only the sound of walking on wet ground is possible to discern. The illuminated plant appears momentarily. We hear the clicking of a car indicator, lapping water, rushing air. The bewilderment of the journey dramatizes the gap between people and surrounding infrastructures, which are so often hidden, almost unimaginable. Yet the silent determination of the protagonist bridges the distance.

 (2023) similarly addresses the aftermath of the Tōhoku earthquake but in a more ethereal way. The piece moves through six sequences that capture a beach, devoid of people but not entirely untouched by the human hand. Branches and pieces of driftwood have been erected vertically in the sand. This leafless forest confronts the ocean, seeming to blur the distinction between what is naturally occurring and what is not. Set in an area that was devastated by the Fukushima nuclear accident, 

 is an ephemeral monument that exudes transcendence and renewal.

In 2013 the scholar Rob Nixon coined the term ‘slow violence’ to describe the way present-day problems, particularly environmental ones, elude representation. ‘By slow violence,’ he writes, ‘I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’

Waiting (Ripon Chowdhury with Ho Tzu Nyen)

 (2020) conveys such attritional violence. It is a rare work on Covid-19, the illness and shared trauma that most people would like to forget, and whose impact was distributed so unevenly. The piece was made as a collaboration between Ho, a filmmaker, and Chowdhury, a poet and activist who was also one of the 323,000 migrant workers confined to dormitories during Singapore’s strict quarantine. We see Chowdhury documenting his confinement in mobile phone videos, which he later sent to Ho. The perspective is restless and searching as he tours the cramped living quarters, kitchen and rows of bunk beds that he shares with his fellow workers. Repeatedly he turns to the window, overlooking a road, describing his situation as ‘very helpless and completely alone … unreal’. 

 is an account of his ‘captivity’, of a quarantine that cannot be escaped or upgraded. ‘Life is at a standstill’, Chowdhury says. ‘The world has stopped to defeat an invisible enemy.’

 (2009) traces another kind of slow violence through the lost future of the DeLorean car and the mobility that the auto industry offered. Through archival footage, it details how the American dream embodied in the car deteriorated: when the company’s Detroit-based owner decided to locate its factory in Belfast, Northern Ireland, production was hobbled by Thatcher-era disinvestment, leaving a local population without the life-changing opportunities they were promised and inflaming internal tensions. Time has proved how potent that dashed hope was, and how many people still want it back. Campbell traces this desire as it settles into resentment along existing religious divisions; such feelings have, in some cases, further curdled into xenophobia and fury since the film premiered in 2009.

(2017), set in Lebanon, tells an enormous story within 50 minutes. The essayistic film alternates between close-up interviews and magnificent views of a dry and mountainous landscape, so vast that it humbles the human activity within it. The film follows three protagonists who are devoted to the care and conservation of ruins, among them Roman temples, archaeological artefacts and car parts. Just as Jarman suspended the moments between life and afterlife, here Brennan links ruin and renewal as two faces of a single epic time scale, spanning thousands of years. In a time when we are continually confronted by spectacular events that explode into contemporary consciousness and just as quickly fade away, these pieces give form and focus to the complicated consequences of their long fallout.

Notes

Biographies 

Fallout

The Drift

Make It New John

Being Blue

My Power

Erect

screening

Joan Jonas

mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

Midway in the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood, / for the straight way was lost.
– Dante Alighieri, 

It begins with a toy town alone in the woods. Its empty pagoda and closed red barn suggest the sadness of a roadside antique mall on a Tuesday morning in February. This is like Dante, too, who – 

 – comes to himself, or finds himself, or realizes himself (any of the three will do) in his 

, stricken with a melancholy consciousness, rattled, confused, like a dreamer waking into a dream and blanking the logistics. The sadness of Jonas’s town in the woods lasts no more than 20.5 seconds. Dante’s introductory sadness, nine stanzas. This, after all, is art and not life, where the sadness often feels like it will go on forever.

’ initiates the interpretive process. His grammar makes an object of himself. Dante writes, in both the

(1294), about a charming figure from Florence who is also Dante, and who, like him, is in love with a girl named Beatrice. He does this so convincingly that for centuries it became commonplace to declare that this is the poet for whom it would never be necessary to build a monumental tomb, he having in this way already entombed himself in such an enduring way. It’s an old trick of poetry that poets have learned to so freely extract ourselves from ourselves, that we confidently parse out consciousness, subject and object, mythos and bios. Jonas’s body of work draws neatly from this poetic self-splitting. In 2014, when asked by an interviewer if her work was autobiographical, Jonas confirmed: ‘No. I am absolutely against that.’

This iconic Dante whose face in all the artwork always already resembles its death mask, the poet now encrusted by hard, heavy centuries of literary authority, is absent in Jonas’s work. It is not Dante the alabastered 

-poet whom Jonas’s reading confronts. It is also not Dante’s system, with its exhausting legacy of architectural schema and cosmological speculations. Instead, Jonas’s fragments of Dante feel drawn from his poem as water drawn from the well: as necessary, and by the cupful.

Jonas’s reading is of the liquidity of Dante’s substance, which is vision and his love-struck metaphysics. Feeling itself is molten. In both works, familiar images and strange propositions slither and writhe through the matrix of time. The poet Osip Mandelstam called Dante a ‘strategist of transformation’. He proposed that any scientific examination of the 

 would ‘inevitably take the form of a treatise on metamorphosis’. Mandelstam contrasted Dante’s transformations with those of cinema, which he said possesses ‘the powers of metamorphosis of a tapeworm’ and ‘achieves a vicious parody of the instrumentality of poetic speech, since, within it, frames move without a struggle, one simply replaced by another’.

 Fair enough. But video art once was to cinema what Dante’s vernacular Italian (his 

, sweet new style) was to Latin. Both once issued the irresistible invitation of immediacy, of democracy, and the sincerity afforded by all reputedly impoverished materials. While Jonas makes use of this apparent ease of transformation, video retains its own friction: the candid, stuttering edge of video remains intact.

Dante compares his feeling in that dark wood to that of ‘one who, with labouring breath, / has escaped from the deep to the shore’ (

I.22–23). When Jonas appears in the woods as a figure in her own work, she looks less like the shipwrecked and more like a sorceress. First dressed in practical and nondescript clothing, she returns to her portal in white linen and an ethereally jagged hat, a diaphanous costume that mostly suggests an angel, doesn’t suggest a hairshirt, and only slightly suggests a shroud. Jonas is reading Dante, but she is also sweetening him, and we are reading Jonas as she reads. She gazes both into and out of her convex mirror in the woods, appearing also to be reading us.

Jonas is reading, in voiceover, a passage from 

, Canto X: a fragment which, in Dante, hurts. Farinata degli Uberti, a philosopher now caught in the circle of heretics, describes his torturous predicament: the far-sightedness of the damned. For these cursed seers, future vision exists in its contour, but the real, with its immediate, intimate and beloved textures, is out of reach. As long as time itself still exists, the present, to the heretics, will be absent. The portal will only shut on Judgement Day, which is at least an ambivalent resolution to the problem: everything will be eternity, but for the damned there will be no sight at all.

In Jonas’s dappled forest Dante’s words remain the same, but in Jonas’s reading they are now liberated from much of the 

’s agony. The passage shimmers with something nearly benevolent. We can’t see everything, but it’s okay. For a time and in this dimness, at least, we have the consolation of future vision’s light.

Dante himself had been reading Virgil, and with so much devotion that when he discovers the poet he calls ‘my teacher’ and ‘my author’ at the first canto’s terrifying junction of leopard, lion and she-wolf, he bows his head and exposes the erotic hopefulness of all readers: ‘let my long study and great love avail / that made me delve so deep into your volume’ (I.83–84). When we are reading, there is always this mix of wanting and scrying: gazing with future-longing and passionate interest into mediating stuff. This stuff can be iconic, or figural, or living, or patient and in situ, like an epic poem or a cast-off toy, for the animating – and annihilating – confrontation:

as when you drew Marsyas out from his limbs.

These lines, the next ones read by Jonas – now over the images of the blazing fire of a kiln – are nearly perverse in their rendering of inspiration’s transfigurations: ‘

sì come quando Marsia traesti / de la vagina de le membra sue

’, which is literally ‘enter into my breast and breathe there / as when you drew Marsyas from the sheath [vagina] of his limbs’.

, the poet is begging Apollo for help. This is so he can help us, in turn, see what he saw: ‘that I may show the merest shadow / of the blessed kingdom stamped within my mind’ (I.23–24).

There’s Apollo, the god who gives poets their laurels, and then there’s Apollo who, in his clandestine way, is also, or merely, a reader of poetry. The reader, each in her turn, is the one who now animates Dante’s vision. Dante, who longs for Apollo’s inspiration, and we the readers, who long for Dante’s, and Dante’s text, which longs for us, are engaged in a kind of 

 – the mingling of breaths. The mingling of breaths is also, in the Christian tradition Dante knew, the mingling of the living spirit itself.

This is why when we read poetry’s epic invocations, they are often also read 

 the reader, in an inevitable and vatic second person. The faith in a poem’s invocational ‘you’ is as much a faith in sociality as it is in the muses or gods. It is the faith that someone will be there, in the future, on the living side of the encounter, a witness to be called on directly and to feel the call. Even the flickering richness of a video dream like Jonas’s, which might as well be a poem for its lyric power, would lie dead in the dim pixels of a forgotten hard drive without its readers. It is by the ardent light of reading that we cheer up the dark solidity of objects.

It was Dante in Florence who invented, with his friends, the sweet new style. But I think a lot about the older Dante, in exile in Ravenna, aggrieved at the eating of other people’s bread, the climbing of other people’s stairs. The

 is full of the bitter relief we win in exile, and his 

, are riven with the brutality and sorrow of his own dark times. If Jonas’s 

 embraces Dante’s lyric power, it also refuses Dante’s wild anguish. No one’s eyelids are bolted shut by rusty nails. Dante’s ingenious tortures are missing, as is his sadism, as is any sense of vendetta – enemies are not made to suffer their second death in the underworld. The kiln-fires of Jonas’s second movement are somehow almost sane and reassuring, less like torturous hellfire and more like purifying forces, the ones that promise to justly test our works but leave us unburnt. As if to prove this point, Jonas, in her next scene, moves on to a world of children; desaturated, inverted, nearly wholesome, all of them are entrained together in the busy work of play, arranging the miniature buildings with a dog among them, happily helping out.

If we get any of the epic Dantean hard suffering, it is only in the video’s final act, in which the excerpt Jonas reads – one of pouring rain and howling like dogs and running from the law and writhing on hooks – is layered over an image world of frantic, zany automata. The once sweet entertainments of the children’s world – including the toy town – are undulating with fiendish power: dolls sway, puppets swing from their carousel, and no human hand is seen making these bright machines go. The toys look both innocent and out of their minds. Or at least they look more like the present’s wound-up humans than like the nightmare droids of the present’s war machines – the AI, the drones, the hope-eviscerating weaponry and systems of surveillance that behave with what sometimes feels like a diabolic vendetta against planetary life itself.

It is these toys, these cast-off automata, that come the closest to a Dantean form of inventively miserable predicament. This is because the toys, though amassed together and in action, are missing something vital. Who was it that flipped their switch, set them going? And will this maker, this animator, ever come back? In short, these toys long for God, as we might also long for God, as we might also be creepy old dolls and neon puppets in hyper-motion, playing our predictable instruments, fearing and longing for the stilling of time.

It would not be like Joan Jonas if we were left there, existentially bereft with an absconded God in an infernal toy shed. An animal appears: a blessed and smiling white dog. The dog is at ease and shows a healthy interest, is near to the camera, and its nearness suggests fidelity to a presence unseen but always close by. This dog is a gift – a punctum of mercy – reminding us of the children who were at play earlier with their own happy dog. If we are lucky or so inclined, maybe the white dog is an angel who indicates the nearness of the divine, maybe even a redemptive angel who would, like Walter Benjamin’s, ‘stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’.

 If the dog in the toy-scape is not a divine being, it is at least a testimonial one, reminding us of something beyond what feels, in our present, like hell. ‘What’s outside we only know from the animal’, as Rilke says, adding: ‘

Und wo wir Zukunft sehn, dort sieht es Alles

’ – ‘where we see Future, it sees All’.

Biographies

The Far Sightedness of the Damned: On Future Lot: Reading Dante

Future Lot: Reading Dante

The Far-sightedness of the Damned:  On Future Lot: Reading Dante

Tao Hui

假作真時真亦假,
無為有處有還無。

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true
Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real

—Cao Xueqin, 紅樓夢/ 

Do you remember that day up on stage? Your left hand in mine, your right clapped over your mouth. The world, it spun, but when I turned to you, I saw it all clearly. Crystals at the tips of your nails. The gape of your mouth, widening in the spotlight. Sobbing, but your bangs still disconcertingly intact. Hairspray gloss. The shock. Coloured contacts dilating your eyes, wide and round and green. Mirroring the audience. Their cooing. Screaming. Your wrist waving limply. This happens. Season after season of reality shows to assemble the cutest girl group, the most alluring boy idols.

A story like this, to be feasible, has to come to an end. The camera pans. We made it. Across the stage, a mid shot of other eliminated contestants, folding to the floor in distress. I shut the browser. YouTube ad, stifled. The glare of my bedroom lamp against the laptop screen. My legs. Scraping the softness of the duvet. Worn soft by leisure. Watching 

, which is a 2024 survival reality competition created by Mnet in collaboration with Teddy Park’s The Black Label. A cast of adolescent BLACKPINK hopefuls. Stern but loving mentors, stalwarts in the K-pop industry. Only six spots in the group. Not everyone gets to debut. Not everyone gets to have a promising career as an artist. But some do.

The theatre of reality TV is founded in formula. Part of a long tradition of melodrama, after all – composed of tropes and patterns that in their arbitrary combination and recombination are engineered to automatically provoke an emotional response within me. Even, or perhaps especially, when exaggerated or absurd. So I cry. I am not on stage, pining for a glittering future. I am not a contestant in a survival programme. Not even a teenage girl, not anymore. I get up and trip over my disgruntled cat, trying to brush the crumbs from my sheets.

But your nails in my palm. I still feel them. I raise my hand to brush confetti from my cheek. ‘It’s different, isn’t it,’ you say, trembling. On the brink of a dream come true. ‘It’s different now that it’s real.’

I swoon. Weak for it. I can’t resist falling head first into its obliterating embrace. 

The artist and filmmaker Tao Hui would understand, known as he is for mobilizations of sentimentality, in which he appropriates and intervenes into cross-temporal mediums of melodrama, from nostalgic C-drama to TikTok, live streams to classical Chinese texts. Inhabiting a Tao Hui piece is to subject oneself to involuntarily gripping constructions of intimacy while hyperaware of being dangled on the fishhook of mass media.

, a group of actors are tasked with re-performing emotionally charged scenes from Chinese television, culled from programmes ranging from reality TV to C-drama to news features. The original version of said programme plays soundlessly in the background – on a monitor or screen, sometimes projected into another section of the frame. Because of the omnipresence of media in our lives, this doesn’t feel remarkable. The flat screen running a drama on mute above the counter of a boba shop. A movie set up for projection in the park. Still, watching along is a little akin to materializing the disorienting feeling of having subtitles out of sync – especially since the spoken dialogue between the actors in the foreground often precedes the soundless moving of the characters’ lips behind them. Until a dramatic breath or unintended stumble in the actors’ delivery means the TV version once again takes the lead. Until a burst of speed in an actress’s impassioned monologue means her counterpart, mouth a stuttering goldfish-O, begins to lag. No temporal consistency. These actors’ re-embodiment of an extant visual script that yet continues to play unevenly alongside them produces a chaotic, unstable interplay between image and body, avatar and sound. What’s realer? It seems that Tao Hui is ambivalent. Indeed, he stipulates there be no set order to how these scenes are curated or viewed; rather, they can be scrambled, so long as each scene is played only once within the sequence. Without a clear sense of origin, what Tao creates is a cinematic topology in which there is no hierarchy or boundary between reality and fantasy, living and acting. Rather, all these layers, reinforcing and contradicting one another within an edgelessly mutable affective field.

One might assume that these amalgamated displacements would alienate the viewer from the emotional heart of each interaction. Coolly extract the charge from each scenario. And yet, watching 

, I still can’t help but cry. I cry even though I am not the woman on her knees in the restaging of the 

, sobbing for the forgiveness of her parents. All three of them devastated by the way she’s let her wayward lover mistreat her. I am not the athlete facing down the press to account for a serious injury right before the Rio Olympics. But Agustín Zarzosa writes that melodrama’s formally sublimated hysterics – its high artifice, the rigid symbolism of cinema – afford the viewer some relative safety and distance in order to unconsciously access their secret selves. I am not an actor, but when I watch Tao’s prismatic facsimiles of people experiencing the kinds of contradictory feelings that coincidentally collide with my own, perhaps I am, as Zarzosa writes, not watching them so much as ‘finding [aesthetic] pleasure in the private observation of [my] own suffering’.

Strikingly, even when the quivering mouths on the TV screen and the voices of the actors in the foreground barely ever sync up, their gestures always do. A slap to the face of a cheating lover. A hand on the heart, appealing to a yearned-after crush. A forehead dropping down into a set of proffered hands. This punctuating physicality always perfectly timed, as if to drive home the fact that, within the fluctuating currents of 

, no matter where and to whom emotions are occurring – love, filial piety, pain – they are undyingly, unquestionably true.

So I cry. Because I might not be the aspiring pop star in the reality singing programme 

, honouring the sacrifices her mother has made to raise her into the talented young woman she is today. I am not the actress playing her, either, thanking not an audience of hundreds but a few empty chairs in a community auditorium. But I can’t help it. Watching both women sing through their tears, I cry. A childhood photo of the aspiring pop star crawls up the background. Her mother then, young and beautiful, arms wrapped around her tiny form. Gap-toothed, pink headband. Her mother now, fond and weary-faced, clapping for her in the crowd, bathed in pink stadium lights. Because these are insert shots, they look like artificial memories being hallucinated by the ‘real’ actress standing in front of the screen. The overlay of what could be and what is, a dream fulfilled and a dream emergent, compounding the strength of my own feeling. Mama loves her so much. She’d do anything in her power to make things possible for her. She cries; I cry because deep down, I know that these memories, they belong to me.

So what? Seductive as it is, intense emotion, especially when isolated to the locus of an individual subjectivity, is never inherently subversive. Indeed, in 

, there is an aspirational, didactic undercurrent to its melodramatic narratives that feels as discomfiting as it is sentimentally urgent. Indeed, formulations of love and deep feeling here are not solely relegated to the province of romance but extend to social ideals and concerns that border on the propagandistic. A child from the ‘Heart to Heart’ Art Troupe speaks about his deep love and gratitude for the elders throughout the country (his ‘aunts, uncles, grandmas and grandpas’) who have supported him as a victim of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. A film star, Ko Chen-tung, embroiled in a marijuana scandal laments how he has betrayed the love and concern of his fans. Above him, a popular children’s cartoon hovers on a screen, as if indicating to the viewer that this is a lesson to learn. He is a cautionary tale.

Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China

, he describes how China’s late 1970s transition into global neoliberalism meant it was in the state’s interest for Chinese subjects to reframe their idealized notions of love. Rather than the previous state-sanctioned ‘revolutionary romanticism’, in which citizens’ individual interests were subordinated to the government’s socialist cause, the administration encouraged subjects to cultivate ‘agential selves motivated to seek familial opulence and prosperity in market competition’.

 Zhang raises the example of the popular dating show 

, in which young professionals go through a series of challenges to help them find a perfect spouse. Meant to enable these young men and women to become romantically and emotionally fulfilled, the series instead uses the spectacle of mass media to align the characteristics and qualities of an ideal partner with ‘private property ownership, upward mobility, and endurable heteronormative intimacy’.

It is through the reproducible quality of melodrama that 

 reveals to us, as Zhang describes, how state forces can become insidiously woven into the affective apparatus of love, shaping its viewers’ desires and aspirations so these better align with the needs of the neoliberal state. We get the sense that the actors are interpellated by or seem to be unconsciously modelling what the original TV programmes are espousing – whether in the way of hard-earned success, heterosexual romance or reproductive futurism. This is compounded by the fact that the actors participating in the re-enactment of scenes often seem more like ‘regular’ citizens, ripe and ready for instruction. Dressed casually and not shrouded by the aura of hair and makeup, nor glamorized by costume or style, they could be students or retirees or office workers. They occupy settings that appear to be public spaces of quotidian life and learning – community centres, school auditoriums, classrooms, coffee shops, parks.

Still, there is an aura of the ill-fitting, a gawkiness of the emergent that permeates 

 and suggests that its actors’ re-embodiments in fact fail to fit into their idealized templates. That they can’t live up to the unattainable standards of their originals. Indeed, even though the actors often speak first and occupy the foreground of the shot, the highly produced nature of television – its artful editing of close-ups and wide-angles, its colour correction and audience shots – means that the viewer’s eye is often drawn towards the original TV programme playing in the background. What is manufactured appears strangely more naturalistic. In contrast, the actors’ exchanges, filmed as a single mid shot, appear static, stilted. The incongruence of their soap-opera dramatics jammed into a banal setting. Their theatrical language highlighted by the plainness of the frame.

Sometimes, the re-enactments feel more like crude imitations, involving inferior props or markers that seem to suggest the actors inhabit different social or class positions than their televised counterparts. Meaning there is a sense of the surreal, the absurd to these inconsistencies. For example, in the re-enactment of a scene from the classic 1994 C-drama romance 

), a marriage proposal between a couple that originally takes place originally in a luxury car, accompanied by a vibrant bouquet, is restaged on a public transit train alongside a single, bedraggled rose. Similarly, in the scene from the 2014 reality show 

, in which real-life childbirth is televised, the original programme includes the subtitled voices of family and medical staff off-screen, supporting the labouring mother, tenderly stroking her forehead. In the re-enactment, the actress is alone in a small apartment, accompanied only by a merrily steaming humidifier in place of a wailing baby.

A hallmark of melodrama is that its characters are unable to truly face, let alone address the root cause of their emotional suffering – instead, they end up cleaving to socially directed trajectories that lead them to false happy endings. Similarly, in 

, we get the uncanny feeling that a wealth of its subjects’ potentially heterogeneous experiences have been truncated, squeezed into the oversimplified patterns of melodrama’s homogeneity. And even though the emotional stakes of each situation always feel vital, the context or logic behind their intensity seems ambiently obscured, unable to be entirely understood. Perhaps 

’ most sinister element is its exposure of popular media’s role not just in modelling but 

 generic, state-sanctioned formulations of ambition, love and desire – that nonetheless are experienced by subjects as private, singular, true.

Another word for what is scripted but whose mechanism remains obscured is fate. When I was a child, I was obsessed with the 1987 TV series 

, adapted from the eighteenth-century classic Chinese novel of the same name, and a scene of which is re-enacted in 

. Following the fortunes, both good and ill, of the wealthy, aristocratic Jia family, the plot revolves around a love triangle composed of the protagonist, Jia Baoyu, the male heir of the Jia family, and his cousins Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai. An air of predestination drapes luxuriously over the narrative: Baoyu, reincarnated from a stone and sent to the human realm to learn more about the joys and sufferings of human existence; Daiyu’s previous incarnation, owing Baoyu a debt of tears; Baoyu, born with a jade in his mouth whose inscriptions perfectly match the golden locket that Baochai has carried since childhood. The characters’ fates are foretold from the outset: Lin Daiyu will tragically die, Baoyu and Baochai will marry, and Baoyu will eventually become a monk.

Suffering as I was with the usual afflictions of girlhood, I found immense comfort in the idea that the melodrama rendered on-screen was in service of a captivating narrative; I loved the pleasure of knowing the end. Even if it was senselessly tragic, excessively melancholy, it at least served a kind of cathartic resolution. Everything in its place. Because of this, I desired to grasp myself through the image of one of the two heroines in 

. If I accomplished this, then clearly I would understand my own life’s purpose. So I conducted meticulous studies, comparing my granular characteristics to those of Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai, but I wasn’t a right fit for either type. Much like Lin Daiyu, to whom I related more, I had a severe respiratory illness. A sarcastic, nihilistic streak. But I did not possess her frail build, nor her temperamental nature. Undeniably, however, I had Xue Baochai’s voluptuous build and rosy complexion, large eyes. Her social adeptness and people-pleasing impulses. This inability to conform to either template of ideal classical Chinese femininity distressed me. Everywhere I looked, I saw my difference. In the flabbiness of my hips when Daiyu’s were dainty. In my salty retorts to classmates, not at all possessed of Baochai’s tact or restraint. In the desperate crush I developed on the tall, netball-playing girl I tried not to glance at from my shadowy corner of the schoolyard.

Most of all, I resented how constantly observing my difference denied me the clarifying pleasure, the relief, of being fated.

instigates, and is, to me, where its radicality lies. Refusing to simply relegate its participants wholesale to the formulaic resolutions, the falsely tidy endings of either melodrama or the state, it instead pulls apart the process of replication. By illuminating, indeed enhancing the failures of its actors to successfully emulate the original TV show, it lures viewers into a state of heightened awareness to difference. And as we track the discrepancies between the original programmes and their re-enactments, we begin to notice other kind of aberrancies within each scene that are less easily interpreted, explicable or assimilable. For example, in the original altercation between a woman and her cheating lover from the 2013 drama 

, the couple is interrupted by a beautiful white woman, ostensibly the male character’s new lover. But in the re-enactment she has disappeared. What about the partial TV screen in the far-left corner of Ko Chen-tung’s drug scandal apology scene, playing what appears to be a period C-drama? Is this in any way related to the fact that Ko’s image is to be eventually recuperated, not by community service or any material restitution but through his role as a patriotic police officer during the Japanese occupation? Not to mention – in the proposal scene from 

, the artist Tao Hui himself is named as the reason that the couple meet up. Intentional? In the original script? I have no idea. But it doesn’t matter. These questions and hesitations give me pause, are enough to disrupt the cathartic pleasures of melodrama. Shock me out of my complacence in accepting any generically assigned fate.

In her essay ‘Disambiguation, a Tragedy’, Nan Z. Da points out that Chinese victims of the Cultural Revolution have difficulty telling the stories of their oppression ‘without resorting to hyperbole and melodrama’, because after prolonged exposure to propaganda, they no longer have recourse to any other expressive vocabulary. Da calls upon the literary critic’s skills of disambiguation to locate, within these victims’ narratives, the ‘crucial, if finely drawn, difference between being forced to say what you do not believe and being left with no logical way to say what you 

 In other words, Da proposes it might not be possible to exactly unearth the essential or ‘real’ truth beneath the exaggeration of a state narrative. But cultivating the practice of observing difference, of discernment, when encountering those narratives can itself serve as a mode of resistance towards state apparatuses.

, the more I am compelled to point out incongruities that emerge. Not just between what is on-screen and what is being re-enacted, but in terms of what has been added or subtracted, underscored or faded away. Tao activates our desire to dwell within those interstitial points of inaptness as a means of pointing towards what lies beyond the frame; invites us to see or speculate differently, even if it might be lonely. It’s up in the air as to whether we can ever or entirely escape the surveillance or interpellation of the state. But can these insolvable ambiguities, spawned by a process of imperfect replication, create gaps for subversion? 

 proposes a practice of disambiguation as the first step towards the kind of phenomenological nonconformity that might allow us to intervene within or flinch from state narratives, even while still trapped in the clutches of our unfettered emotion. Its unreality. Its –

Surface. Antidote. The slippery black sheen of the floor beneath our feet. Moving. Unmoving. The thing is that it’s poison. The way you lean forward. Suddenly excited. Vaguely, I hear the elimination music play, a saccharine, sentimental echo. The thing is that there’s crying. There’s always crying underneath. Our shared sense of the future. Behind us. Someone shrieking. And you in that dress, making your angles protrude. Looking geometric. Looking flat. Roundness in your face. Trembling next to me. The air around you pulsating, like a caress.

Your nails in my palm. I still feel them. I raise my hand to brush confetti from my cheek.

‘It’s real, isn’t it,’ you say, smiling sweetly. On the brink of a dream come true. ‘Right now. This is real. Because wouldn’t it be tragic? If it weren’t?’

The world hazy, like through a lens. Through blue tinted glass. I tilt my head to the sound of a voice. Sounding wispy. Not my own. Sounding impossible.

The sensation of being watched intensely. ‘Who cares if it’s real?’ I say. ‘I can feel that it’s different.’

It’s different now that it’s real: Disambiguating Tao Hui’s 'Joint Images'

Joint Images

Jes Fan

Tishan Hsu

 (2023), an oyster’s viscous fluid seeps and oozes to a soundtrack of vaguely oriental instrumentals intermingled with the sounds of squelching and squishing as a human finger uncomfortably pokes at its fleshy yellow body in search of a pearl. Fan, best known for his anthropomorphic sculptures made of delicate materials like glass and resin, collaborated with scientists to cultivate oysters native to Hong Kong. Grounded in the biological fact that the bivalves produce pearls in response to foreign irritants – secreting an iridescent nacre that, in effect, fossilizes the intruder – Fan inserted silicone cutouts of Chinese characters that form the phrase ‘Pearl of the Orient’, Hong Kong’s colonialist moniker, into the oysters’ shells, prying them open three years later to see them encrusted in their opalescent mantles. ‘I want it to swallow its own name,’ Fan insidiously offers. Using tweezers to surgically implant the animals with the synthetic material, he enacts the postcolonial thinker Frantz Fanon’s theory of internalized oppression, a process by which colonized individuals unconsciously absorb the dehumanizing beliefs of their oppressors. 

As the video unfolds, Fan overlays a series of subtitles onto the moving images: ‘C is for Contamination. C is for Culture. C is for Consumption. C is for Class. C is for Cyclical. C is for Capital. C is for Colony.’ The litany of statements beginning with the letter ‘C’ functions as a rhythmic polemic against the aspirational vision of Hong Kong as a deracinated commercial hub. Interspersed among the closely cropped shots of the oysters’ manipulated bodies, Fan splices in scenes ofthe gleaming metropolis – the perfectly sculpted face of a light-skinned print model as reflected in a building’s polished facade, compliant consumers ascending escalators within the mirrored architecture of a multistorey shopping mall – tracing the remnants of the British colonial imprint on the city’s cultural and economic landscape.

The fate of oysters has long been viewed as a syndrome and symbol of short-sighted profit-seeking, as chronicled by Joseph Mitchell, a giant of mid-twentieth-century American journalism. Similar to Hong Kong’s once-thriving oyster trade, New York Harbor’s abundant shellfish beds were nearly decimated by centuries of over-harvesting and industrial pollution. In his 1951 

article ‘The Bottom of the Harbor’, Mitchell traces the decline of one of the world’s richest oyster habitats, focusing his lens on the simultaneous disbanding of the communities of Italian American and other working-class immigrants who once laboured at the city’s waterfronts. Mika Rottenberg’s 2015 film 

 examines the global commercial oyster harvesting industry more than half a century later. After visiting a pearl factory in Zhuji, China, Rottenberg centred her work on the extractive nature of cultured pearl production, whereby the bodies of oysters and their human labourers – in this case, the stooped backs of the hundreds of Chinese female factory workers who sit crouched over their stations, sifting through pearls, and the grotesque growth of their white overseer’s nose – are physically deformed in the cultivation process. Rottenberg’s absurd and violent allegory of the global supply chain makes clear that no one is spared in the capitalist economy.

(2005) visualizes the next turn of the screw in our species’ recent experiments in environmental exploitation. Like Fan, Hsu is known primarily for his premonitory painting and sculptural practice that for decades anticipated the transformation of the human body in the digital age. 

, his first entry into time-based media, begins and ends with the sickening glug of oil being poured onto itself, harking back to Mitchell’s description of New York City’s polluted harbour as a sludge of ‘black, bubbly water’.

Throughout Hsu’s nearly twenty-minute video, we hear the laboured breathing of a person connected to a ventilator, ocean waves colliding with the electrical hum of a defibrillator, and animalistic growls interwoven with the blaring sounds of hospital alarms. A hodgepodge of human and nonhuman animal noises – clucking chickens and mammalian brays, snarls, sighs and grunts – against the rhythmic backdrop of pressurized hissing and mechanical clicks, collapses the divide between the living organisms and automated systems. The visual field similarly becomes scrambled,as holographic fish, kaleidoscopic amphibians, and indistinguishable body parts – a belly button, folds of flesh – merge with abstracted shapes and patterns,making it difficult to separate animate from inanimate matter.

Made five years before the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill – the largest oil disaster in recorded history, which released more than four million barrels of petroleum into the waters off the coast of Louisiana – Hsu’s video chillingly foreshadows the catastrophic impact of human industry and greed on Earth’s ecosystems. In addition to causing one of the largest wildlife mortality events in the Gulf of Mexico, including the billions of oysters that once inhabited its widespread reefs, the oil spill’s long-term effects continue to impact the region’s marine ecology. Aerial shots of the oil slicks at the time showed bright orange sheets fanned out across the ocean’s surface with iridescent streaks that reflected the sun’s rays – a sheen reminiscent of the lustrous interiors of Fan’s oyster shells. While Fan’s 

 uses oysters as both metaphors and material evidence of bodies susceptible to capitalist inscription, Hsu’s 

 suggests that humans and animals have already fused with industrial landscapes, rendering us inseparable from the toxic environments we inhabit. In 2023, Japan started to release contaminated wastewater from its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, while in the United States several chemical manufacturing firms have been found to have continued production of so-called ‘forever chemicals’ despite their toxicity.

 In recent years, scientists have confirmed the existence of microplastics in human lungs, placenta, breast milk and blood, as well as in the soft tissue of nearly every oyster.

Towards the end of Hsu’s video, an elderly man groans. A baby babbles. Perhaps the life cycle carries on. Oysters, long exploited for their meat and pearls, have in more recent years been viewed as part of environmental restoration efforts given the critical role they play in maintaining healthy marine ecosystems. A single oyster can filter almost 200 litres of water a day, purifying the ocean’s water and providing habitats that support coastal biodiversity. ‘C is for Change. C is for You,’ Fan’s video concludes, suggesting that even within cycles of capitalist destruction, there remains the possibility of human agency and renewal. But nothing is assured. Warming and acidifying oceans have led to mass oyster die-offs. The fate of oysters and humans is intertwined.

Soft Tissue: Jes Fan’s Palimpsest and Tishan Hsu’s Folds of Oil 

Folds of Oil 

Palimpsest

Soft Tissue: Jes Fan’s 'Palimpsest' and Tishan Hsu’s 'Folds of Oil'

Stephanie Comilang

 (Come to Me, Paradise; 2016), time is treated preciously. We follow the lives – partly fictionalized – of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong. We are guided by a spirit narrator, Paraiso, who is all-seeing and mystical. Comilang deftly mixes freshly shot footage with more intimate modes of film: vlogs and mobile phone videos made by the women stars of her picture. Labour is the film’s subject, but its conditions are portrayed through other means: we are made privy, instead, to a time that is saturated with intimacy, celebration and friendship.

Skye Arundhati Thomas:
At the very start of 

, we’re thrown into a mysterious place – a bounty of tumbling hills and lush greenery – and we hear the voice of a narrator, the titular Paraiso. You build the story slowly from there; we travel to a city and then into a single room, where someone is getting ready for her day. And then you take us to a large square filled with women inside makeshift structures; we still don’t quite know what’s happening – until it’s revealed that the women are domestic workers, and this is how they spend their Sundays.

Stephanie Comilang:


 is a film about labour, but you never see anyone working. That was important to me; it was one of my first big projects, and I had been thinking about how to approach this subject for a while. I knew I wanted to make work specific to Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong. I remember reading a quote from someone who hadn’t been to Hong Kong before: out on the streets on a Sunday, they weren’t sure if they were seeing a festival or a large gathering of unhoused people. And there was something so uncomfortable and complex about that description. It wasn’t until I went there on a research trip that I realized how incredible those Sunday scenes were.

All you see is women. There are barely any men around. You see cardboard and strung-up fabric; they’ve built semi-private rooms in public spaces. The first time I saw them, I asked: why? I had many whys: why are so many people here? Why are they using this space? Why aren’t they inside or at home on their holiday? It all comes down to the lack of space in Hong Kong. Domestic workers have to, by law, live with their employers. This means they have no private space, and the only way they can access private space is to go into public space and create private space for themselves. They use the architecture of central Hong Kong, the raised walkways and staircases, and they make small rooms to hang out in, to eat, chat, and call their families and kids.

SAT:
In one scene, we see a woman in a shimmery red dress, she’s on a microphone, and everyone’s cheering in the square; there’s indeed a festive mood in the air. But of course, this is tinged with the darkness of what it means for them to have so little time for themselves, for joy.

SC:
The women in Hong Kong have built their own world, which is full of many different characters. There are the butch tomboys from Mindanao, for instance, and the beauty queens; some of the women are second- or third-generation workers abroad. They also have their own economy, where they do manicures, pedicures, makeup, haircuts, or sell food. The way the city is built, and its lack of space, forces them to create what is actually a very special ecosystem.

But it’s a very hard life there. During my first research trip, there was a case in the courts of an Indonesian domestic worker who was almost killed while at work. When her boss dropped her off at the airport, she had lost half her body weight, and they found strange marks on her. Protests and demonstrations were happening often. But I didn’t want to show that. I was interested in how the women meet on Sundays, and how they spend their free time. I wanted to make a film about their moments of community, intimacy and pleasure.

SAT:
You often have an all-seeing narrator that guides us through your films. In 

, the narrator seems ancient, a ghostly figure between worlds who hovers over landscape and people; her perspective is that of a drone. She – Paraiso – uses an ‘I’ pronoun, but it often feels more like a ‘we’. She speaks in the manner of a chorus, in the ancient Greek sense: someone whose voice is also that of a larger community.

SC:
Paraiso is meant to be from the place with the hills, the one you see in the film’s opening sequence. That’s a real place in the Philippines called Bohol. The hills are old limestone covered in grass, and in the summer months they turn brown because of the lack of rain. They’re called the Chocolate Hills. I find the landscape so otherworldly and startling. And so I created a narrative where all the women are from this place, and they used to live under the hills once, and Paraiso is from there, too, just like them.

For me, Paraiso is one and the same as all the women in the film, and maybe she even says that. It’s just that her job is different from that of the other women. Her job is to transfer messages; she’s a conduit. She carries their messages back home.

I always begin a work by talking to people. On my first research trip to Hong Kong, I visited Bethune House, a shelter for foreign women who have nowhere to go if they lose their jobs. In Hong Kong, there’s something called the ‘two-week rule’, where, if you get fired, you have only two weeks to find a new job, or you face deportation. I also spoke to journalists. And, of course, I spoke to the women, the workers. While listening to those interviews and working on the script, this character – Paraiso – began to emerge in my mind. She is timeless because she is from many different eras and has many different perspectives. She’s an amalgamation of all the voices I heard while working on the project, including my own.

SAT:
Paraiso and the origin story of the Chocolate Hills add a fictional layer to what is a very real story. It infuses the film with magic and whimsy. This feels meaningful; it’s how you’ve made work about labour without resorting to representational tropes.

SC:
I wanted to create something multilayered that didn’t adhere to the traditional norms of documentary. I wanted to talk about real people in atypical situations and, importantly, about how they spend their pleasure time. Introducing fiction is a way to sidestep the problematics of documentary. I think documentary as form is a difficult one. It proposes a ‘truth’, which, for me, doesn’t exist because multiple truths exist simultaneously. You often have to get the speaker to say what you want them to say, which is absurd – you might as well make fiction! And so I like layering the two. It also becomes so much easier when I have this third voice materialize, the voice and approach of a character, and it’s easier to write from their perspective. In this one voice of Paraiso, I imagine multiple voices speaking on top of each other, and in these voices, there’s my experience as well as those of the people I talk to.


SAT:
In the near-magical world of your film, everyday moments and objects are imbued with special powers. In one scene, the women line up in a square, the sun is setting and the sky is an aqua blue. They’re on their phones, which appear like talismans.

SC:
The phone is a spiritual object in the film. The women hold it up in front of them, and they’re meditating. You can’t hear them, but they are saying: ‘Come to me, Paradise’. On Sundays, the women have their phones in front of them all the time because they’re either talking to each other or to their kids and family. In the film, the phone is also how they call Paraiso, who sends their messages back home. In the scene you describe, Paraiso and the women are talking to each other. They’re holding their phones out, and Paraiso is downloading what they show her. They’re standing in a line, which is a fictional moment in the film, and this was my reference to how Filipino women have to queue up on Sundays in order to send their remittances.

SAT:
All representation is arguably an act of fiction-making. While you, as the filmmaker, don’t necessarily have a documentary approach, the women in your film sometimes do: they film themselves in their rooms or while asking each other questions.

SC:
How someone wants to represent themselves is important to me. Some of the footage is from the women’s phones – it’s clips they sent me, of filming themselves brushing their teeth or applying makeup. It’s footage of small moments. And it’s theirs. Then there are excerpts from vlogs, many of which are from the YouTube channel of one of the women in the film, Irish May Salinas. When I had first searched for Filipino domestic workers’ vlogs, hers had come up. She had makeup tutorials, cooking tutorials and also financial advice. She’d studied journalism and done a series of guerrilla-style interviews with other working women. I include some in the film; she holds the camera so close to her interviewees. This kind of vlogging style is personal and opposite to the drone character, Paraiso, who is positioned slightly higher and not so proximate. Her angles are different, even though she communicates with the women too.

SAT:
In the film, the vlogs undergo a transformation, and as viewers, we are so lucky to see them and glean their insights. The vlogs become pieces of history; in a sense, they are evidence and an archive of a certain kind of life. Sometimes, this is a life that is being pushed to the margins but refuses its own erasure.

SC:
I really like how personal the vlogs are. It’s a form of storytelling I really enjoy. There’s this dad, for instance, whose videos I watch sometimes. He’s a worker in the Philippines and a single dad taking care of three kids. He puts his phone on his bike and just rides around. It’s so nice. This way of relating to people is compelling to me. It’s similar to reading a book, where you go so deeply into a character that it’s almost like you’re in their head. I appreciate that intimacy.

I’m also interested in how people create space for themselves, especially when they are no longer in the place where they were born. Right now, for instance, I’m obsessed with watching vlogs by Filipinos who live in Japan. They’re factory workers, and they work crazy hours. Their videos are usually about their day, or how much money they spend on groceries, and also about what it’s like when they meet each other socially. It’s a simple formula, but I find the videos soothing, which is also why I watch them. Vlogs are an excellent resource and tool and can also be monetized: they become an added income for those who make them.

SAT:
What’s very moving – and feels like a theme that runs through your work – is how you show migration, travel and even displacement as integral to notions of home. You often blur the binary distinction between home and abroad. It’s almost like you say: home is also when you have to leave.

SC:
In my work, the idea of home is interchangeable, and it’s something I’m always playing around with. I’m curious about what ‘home’ really means and how people express it or have to find it in different places. This is a very common story in the Philippines: a mother has to go to work abroad, but her children are still at home, so they never see their mother. When the mother comes home, it’s time for the children to go abroad to find work. A person in my film 

 (2024) says it so well when describing his relationship with his mother, a domestic worker: ‘Like ships’, he says, ‘passing in the night’.

Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso

Nikita Gale

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

 (2022), the artist appropriates the close-up of Diana Ross performing the three-minute song of the same name from Sidney Lumet’s film 

 (1978). By obscuring Ross’s face with the insistent glare of a handheld spotlight and by silencing her voice, the emotional intensity of the performance is paradoxically heightened. Disguising Ross as the source of the song, the light accentuates those physical gestures that extend beyond the sphere of the beam: her shoulders and chest flex with effort, and the crown of her head rises from the pool of light during the song’s unheard crescendo. Rather than diminishing the emotion of the performance, Gale’s rejection of the cinematic close-up through its erasure works to defamiliarize it and disrupts a straightforward identification of the ‘representational economies’ of its Black subject in the projection of psychic pain. 

In refusing the coupling of audible voice and visible source, 

 also challenges the famous narrative denouement of L. Frank Baum’s novel 

 (1900). In that scene, the unlocatable, acousmatic voice of the Wizard – initially terrifyingly mysterious – is stripped of its mystical power by the classic curtain drop that reveals a frantic old man and, in so doing, binds an ordinary human image to the previously unknowable sound. Simultaneously rejecting what Michel Chion describes as the ‘dis-acousmatic’ gesture of a final reveal, Gale’s partial acousmatic transformation of Ross reveals her as the real source of power.

 This physical act of overexposure therefore serves as an alternate cinematic method of sorts: through projecting light onto the original footage, Gale alters the focus and meaning of what is contained within the frame.

Like Gale’s handheld spotlight, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 

 (2017) also eschews the tools of industrial cinema. Shot on a Digital Harinezumi, a ‘toy’ camera with a fixed lens that digitally produces a noisy, warm image reminiscent of the dreamlike quality of Super 8mm film, the work begins in grainy black and white, as the camera’s sensor struggles to capture a luminous outdoor cinema screen in the darkness of night. Its searing rectangular image glows and stutters as it reveals the audience – seated figures that can only register because of that dancing light. Intercut with a tracking shot of the passage down a street towards a junction, the edges of the frame lush with vegetation, the scene cuts again to the hypnotic rhythm of rolling waves as they hit the beach. A couple, unknowingly performing for the camera, watch a sunset from a balcony, each framed by a pane of a sliding glass door. As this montage cuts back and forth between scenes, a diurnal cycle progresses at different rhythms within them: as the camera travels down the street, the flash of a roadside warning sign and a fluorescent streetlight burn brighter with each repetition, etching increasingly dramatic gashes of light into the frame as the landscape deepens from day to night.

Cultural theorist Svetlana Boym describes a ‘cinematic image of nostalgia’ as a ‘double exposure – a superimposition of two images: home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, the frame breaks, or the surface burns.

 In both films, light serves as both subject and object, metaphor and language, marking time with a light itself that simultaneously creates and partially destroys the image, producing ambiguous and dreamlike meaning within the noise. These vernacular light sources expose an alternate cinematic realm of experience: the sunlight dims, streetlights pulse and streak, and the spotlight and screen burn. Boym likens a passage of Vladimir Nabokov’s writing to a film Andrei Tarkovsky ‘could have made, of sculpting in time with many reflective surfaces for the fleeing shadows. These “odds and ends of light,” this diffused lunar glow, illuminate the elusive scene of memory.’

In ‘And this I dreamt, and this I dream’, Arseny Tarkovsky, whose poetry is immortalized in two of his son Andrei’s films, describes himself as ‘Alone – among mirrors – fenced in by reflections.’ These words are echoed in 

 as a voiceover that accompanies the subconscious world of Weerasethakul’s sleeping subjects – children, adults and animals – following the landscape montage of the film’s first half. The Digital Harinezumi camera cannot record sound, but here the non-diegetic voice is gentle, meditative, and far from fearsome. In 

(2006), philosopher Mladen Dolar describes acousmatic devices in cinema: ‘The screen which conceals the voice disturbs our peace of mind, it forces us mentally to step onto the other side.’

, the visual effect of the camera sensor’s specific low-fi capture encourages this displacement, inviting us to project ourselves into the film’s illusory world. Its high-contrast saturation and choppy grain produces an image that is dappled and dreamlike – a recognizable cinema of afterimages that continue to play even after we close our eyes. Though the camera cannot record sound, the film is accompanied by a piano score composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto. Its initially ominous, repetitive twang unfolds into a melodic register, a series of chimerical atmospheres that provide extrasensory structure and support.

The cinema of Dolar’s acousmatic voice produces the sense that ‘we have “always-already” stepped behind the screen and encircled the enigmatic object with fantasy’.

, the removal of the voice and superimposition of the spotlight conjures its own apparitions. Evading its glare, a ghostly cast of characters from the original film begins to populate the edges of the frame. With an affect not dissimilar to Sakamoto’s instrumental accompaniment, they drift towards us, their quiet visual echo underscoring Gale’s formal gesture of temporal collapse: past with present, reality with memory, dramatization with direct action. Even in silence, the voice lingers, reflected in our subconscious all the same.

 three years after its completion by creating a soft montage of his own. Unlike 

, which involved a superimposition onto the original material, this was a juxtaposition with a new film. Now paired side by side with a sequence titled 

 (2021) – shot during the production of his feature film 

’s initial montage of road, sea and cinema, while still compressing the sunrise to sunset cycle, takes on a newly asynchronous tone. In a single take, filmed from two angles without sound, Tilda Swinton drifts from wakefulness to sleep as blue shadows gradually lengthen across the room.

, Swinton’s sleep is repeatedly interrupted by a loud sound only she can hear. This ultimate acousmatic ‘enigmatic object’ triggers a sonic quest, with its source persistently remaining invisible and off-screen. The film weaves between the psycho-acoustic, phenomenological and, finally, environmental as the protagonist embarks on her own version of a yellow brick road, driven by a desire to identify the sound – a yearning for the ultimate dis-acousmatic event, where sound and image are synced, locked in plain sight for all. Yet, as musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim points out: ‘Attending to the acousmatic question [

 But for now, stripped of direct sound, Sakamoto’s piano provides Swinton with a different kind of score. In 

 (2017–21), Weerasethakul’s land and seascapes and cinema are projected  onto her memories – evoking a subconscious – in a dreamy interval or anticipatory pause that exists outside time, like the temporal gap between seeing a streak of lightning and hearing its distant, thunderous roar.

First Light

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Durmiente & Async

Helen Marten

 (2023) is a short video that cohabits the complex realms of the artist’s sculptural and installation works. Over a series of largely depopulated scenes – a bedroom, an empty swimming pool, a backyard and other snowy vistas – we hear a voice-over repeatedly set the scene for a would-be play, each a dizzying revision that replaces the last. Here we discuss Marten’s impetus for making the film, her reasons to be merciless when making an artwork, and the need to talk about the weather.



, I was taken by the voice-over, read by Gwendoline Christie, which describes a process of the excision of body parts – of cutting off a leg, an arm and removing innards. It seems you want to begin by throwing out the body.




This text is excerpted from a chapter in Roger Caillois’ book 

 (1961) that describes the social function of games. It recounts a dystopic Inuit game of cup-and-ball, where a single participant is disguised as a schematically stylized animal – a fish or a bear – and ‘stabbed’ many times by countless friends engaged in playing the game. The highly specific nature of the play means that each mode of attack, the positioning of the knife in the hand, the rhythmic move towards the act of stabbing must be performed with the correct gesture and in the correct order; if the participant fails in this replication of given movements, the knife is passed to the next player. Throughout the actions of attack and withdrawal, the player with the knife must narrate the story of a journey or a hunt, enumerating each of the phases of attack and dismemberment. The player is free to envisage beyond animal prey, occasionally substituting the proxy ‘animal’ player into the dialogue and weaponizing the attack upon the friend in costume: I beat 

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