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.’

Notes

Biographies

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

Joint Images

screening

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.

Biographies 

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

HOME

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 

head. The dialogue that Caillois recounts is so abrupt, so distinctly unadorned in its literal linguistic tone, but the parsing of the actions themselves is tender and specific to the degree of total mania: 

 folds the skin in half, soaks it in urine, dries it in the sun

 I love the idea that within the pathology of a social death or excoriation, there are multiple speeds of revelation: that within the refrain of total violence, there is equally tactile specificity and instinct for preservation. I found the whole constellation fascinating, imagining that the use of animals as prey within the format of the game is something of an eccentric surplus, a kind of cute security function (like a notation) that permits social violence at a soft remove. I imagined the replication of this text within the video as a prologue, a cataloguing of a very specific emptying out of literally depicted figuration. The final words – 

the pieces for the dogs, the dogs eat – 

are algorithmic in the sense of having reduced the human physicality to zero – a subtraction – whilst offering a digestive filling – an addition – to the roaming animals forthcoming. The text is a portent of sorts, theatre in a diagrammatic and deliberate mode, but absolute abstraction too, if considering a system for quantifying pleasure.


The film shows a series of depopulated habitats that codes as a generic suburban North American town, including a vacated home and barn surrounded by woodland. Contours of lives are felt but not made visible. A sense of unease is underscored by the strike of a pensive piano chord and occasional digital brush of sound. What led you to want to make these environments for this film?



The score is brilliantly composed by Beatrice Dillon, using physical modelling synthesis combined with live piano and clarinet sequences. The sound terms of such a method of composition enable the building of certain hypothetical ‘spaces’ and reciprocal ‘instigators’, such that you can invent the tonal quality of both the receiving environment and the tool that activates it: a shape made of lead struck by an object made of glass wrapped in leather, for instance. The approach is radically expansive, but of course the sonic delivery of the score does not itemize the ingredients. This type of hyper-specificity is also important to each of the environments of the video. Every scene unfolds with an incredible amount of detail – the wooden remnant texture and number of holes excavated in a concrete wall; the slump and quantity of snow on a branch; the positioning of planks and stones on a burnt-out car. Each of these details is pre-drawn in ink, plotted by me in endless written descriptions and animation cel sheets. I’m interested in this spatial paradox of absurdly laboured detail existing in a suspended state, piled up until it almost negates itself to emptiness. The cognitive dissonance is extreme because these are all plausible environments – both domestically and as part of a ruptured capture of nature – but they are exactly nowhere. Of course there are inferences, and these are important too, but the gesturing is miscellaneous and changing rather than precisely underlined. And this simulation exists also in multiple dimensions because the literal substance we are crafting is a treachery, the ghost matter of CGI. Akin to the opening prologue, the dissection of parts is both overarchingly swift – the generic blanketing of snow – but sadistically controlled: the arrangement of objects on a table, how each falls into a geometrically gridded, diagram-like experiential traffic. These are careful instigations of overlap. And snow, too, like a white tablecloth, like an empty page, is a flirtatiously invitational plane.



Rather than encountering your own depictions of humans, we see the appearance of people or bodies through the quotation of other artists’ works, for example Gustave Courbet’s 

 (1933), alongside a more pornographic-type image pinned to a clothes line and flapping in the breeze. It is perhaps no accident that in two of these images we are looking at a vulva. Could you say something about the selection of these artworks?



I love this question! Each of the images belongs to a varying scale of unabashed perversity and indulgence. The Courbet is shorthand and universal. The pubic hair, the opened thighs are radically present and dense, but the body is dimensionally cropped in the manner of a bizarre amputation: there are no full limbs to mobilize the prowess of this implied female shape, so the body instead is inferred as a supplicant, a kind of ambiguous votive vessel to the be fucked and filled on repetitive terms that do not belong to the woman herself. Of course the title implicates both crassly and with wonder, but ultimately the image-vulva belongs to a domain of male structural power. The controversy of Balthus is his erotic fixation on young girls, but this abject complication leads to some very provocative painterly subversions. 

is paired in the video with a second Balthus painting, 

 (1955). The centralized graphic protagonist of 

 is an entirely white-clad and face-obscured baker/decorator carrying a wooden plank. The symbolism is fervent: the man totally unspecific, de-facialized, but radically phallic in his kinetic posture – the plank is diagonally elongated and upright in intent! In pairing the images side by side, I have deliberately rescaled the naked child to the same size as the mercantile man. They are newly equivalent forms. What’s interesting between them is the corruption of detail: the child figure may be completely naked, but she is highly stylized, softened to the degree of becoming only a few slight curve inflections, more like an economically moulded piece of bone than actual radiant flesh. She is an absent and unparticipating figure; the mantel she stands before becomes another surrogate and densely decorative vulva. The street scene in contrast is impressively detailed and painstakingly choreographed, such that every bodily interaction is an attentive part of highly mobile scenography.

In making a simple size analogy between the figures, the parity between male and pubescent child is staggeringly unhinged; terminologies of desire are sublimated beneath algorithmic painterly tricks: geometric forms that offer vectors and holes of flight. The pornography is equally removed, rendered in black and white as a photograph, but with none of the wet pleasure-warmth of any kind of sex. The bodies are once again cropped so they are part of an abstract figuration rather than pure depiction. In all cases, the images have been manipulated in CGI to appear as on paper – fly-posted, pasted to walls, blowing in the breeze. There is a recasting of historicized painting as deliberately causal, excerpted imagery, as casually snipped Jpegs. The historicizing intent has been stripped out, with each image not an icon but part of a poor relegation. The simple answer to this question would be that as bodies, we are all mad particles, raggedly sacks and a collection of small holes in continual mobile use; but the penetrative power in meaning and metaphor alike is continually rearranging. The more complicated answer is likely an avalanche of gender or sexuality marginalization and exploitation.

An occasional light wind animates sequences, while in other moments other seasons, rain or fire takes a prominent role; at other points we become aware in a shift in daylight. These more abstract forms of animation seem to hold fascination – it feels as if you are drawing our attention to the way moments and sequences of experience are in fact indirectly ordered by outside conditions.



, there is a deliberate reckoning of the world as complicit in a type of innate ‘languaging’, whereby all interactions of matter, in a default atomic way, are part of the mobile wonder of the universe: all pieces of all things scattered and overlapping in infinite combinations of tactile exchange. This premise is reliant on the idea of a default mode of forming grammar – rhythms and punctuation – from object overlap, from sound, from structure, from metaphor, and thus creating new vehicles of meaning into which bodies and conditions plunge themselves: a kind of Newtonian action and reaction clause. Birds take flight, accumulate and land, their silhouettes becoming punctuation and rhythm like notes on a music score. Wind is myth and temperament. Weather is analogous as a personal emotional barometer – the nuanced intensities of apathy or bodily dissatisfaction – but it is also social code and distraction. We talk about weather colloquially to disguise discomfort or alleviate social fatigue. Time, here, then, is perhaps not meant as pulse or metronomic speed but as more physical span or length – the space between 

 – but not something segmented like a ruler where portions are literal, but something mythic and encompassing, with the possibility of even and uneven behaviour, like a tree or a bush. The weather is conceptual instigator: beautiful; glacially erratic.


In one striking scene we see a deer that appears shot, its mouth bloody, while a drawing of a deer is lodged under the animal; an iPhone and a paper cut-out in the shape of a snowflake rest on its side as a more realistically rendered snow falls from above. Do you see your work as producing or commenting upon forms of dissociation that otherwise linger or are hidden in today’s dizzying material world?



I don’t see them as dissociation, but more an optimistic, wilful defiance. The dead deer is a literal bleeding animal, but the accumulation of parts atop its body are not composed for the convenience of presentation, rather they belong to the reality of our throbbing human insatiability. Pleasure taken and pleasure abandoned. The iPhone and the paper snowflake are loaded motifs, metaphor and analogy alike – they are 

 – but they are equally humble and shorthand. There is a powerful, refined stillness to the deer, despite its evidently draining prowess, to even offer itself as a tablet upon which to host these items – a collusion in the sacrilege of desecration that triumphs as a kind of elegiac clarity. The phone is replaced at times by ribbons, by oranges and lemons, by an owl that lands to post vigil – the symbolism is hefty. But there is absolutely no irony to this circulation of objects. The deer is the mystical avatar of unplottable realms of language or speech as the spectre. It is also desperate romanticism, unreasonable silence, passionate absurdity – love and shame conjoined.



We tend to think of the descriptive role of language as additive, as if we are endlessly refining the realms of the sensory and what is observed or thought. However, it doesn’t come as a surprise when the sentence ‘Mathematics is a major category’ is firmly uttered by the voice-over – given that one often feels when watching this film that one is in the realm of a visual and linguistic play of subtraction and addition. Indeed, there is even the use of homonyms of ‘nun’ and ‘deer’ to imagine a calculus of objects culminating as something both expensive and voided.



 became an important guide. The book speaks about complicated and fanatic systems of quantifying pleasure, the social function of games and performance, the corruption of intoxication, chance, competition and all manner of other strangeness. There is a refrain in the script, repeated numerous times: 

butterfly, plus elephant, plus cat, plus dead man, plus sailor, plus nun equals deer

. This text is taken from the Caillois book.

 I love the abstract absurdity of this surrogation or simulation – how a simple mathematical term is used as illustrative metaphor – with the animal as a cipher for a known quantity that is both its libidinal self and also a number or a recognizable graphic form. The text and the characters within it are constantly moving in and out of disguise, like putting on masks, or allowing themselves to be rigged, as though part of an analogue puppet show. The very logic of the script is that it follows a singular voice – the ‘I’ – that is aware of its participation in a theatrical event. This voice sometimes splits into ‘we’ and the control is shared, but disembodied. The whole text is deeply meta, a play within a play, within a play. The theatre of theatre! The voice-over is melancholic and solipsistic, but it also performs: the audience is privy to and must engage with both the images of the performance and the mechanics of it.

From the Caillois book, I learnt about a kind of bingo (

) played in Brazil and a form of ‘Chinese charades’ (

) played in Cuba. These games are fully life-encompassing organizations of betting and ritualistic performance. They illustrate the relationships between chance and superstition: money, animals, favours, objects – all change hands and become significant for gambling outcomes. The games are both a social and theoretical lottery (they are predisposed to corruption and the whim of the ceremonial organizers) but they also involve intense calculations and mathematic risk. Animals are given quantities and numbers, and the signs and concordance of the games are adopted into daily life: for instance, a child, instead of adding 2 + 9 + 3 = 14, will add something like the refrain: 

butterfly plus elephant plus cat plus whore plus peacock equals grave

. The terms are fantastical and gorgeous but lodged within a very specific and nuanced logic. The convolution is instead a form of shorthand, a pictographic means of rapid communication. In 

 there are 36 animal (and object) terms, and each is superimposed onto a corresponding body part (see diagram). There are 36 ‘chapters’ in my spoken script, and every animal, item or adjective used within the game is incorporated into the script’s text (and likewise the video’s visuals). Every part is accounted for, even if fleetingly, so the summation of parts belongs to a pre-existing circuitry. This is wildly exhilarating to me – the idea of inflicting panic or uncertainty on an otherwise lucid mind via complex diagrammatic games where the very substance of living becomes like a more embellished version of roulette.

Further, do you view the material construction of adding and subtracting material in your ‘sculptural’ gallery work differently from that of filmic or linguistic worlds?



It’s all a similar obsession – the continual möbius of image and language that is not binary, but operationally polyvocal; that ever speaks to root, to outline, to surface, to logic, but equally to temperature and speed and knot. Word-forms litter dozens of compound image-forms in their wake and vice versa. The exquisite miracle of this is a refusal of stillness, the dynamic reminder that when one thing touches another, this contextual proximity and possibility for structural rhyme shifts identities in space. A continual, perpetual engine.



I’m also interested in the durational aspect of both the book and filmic forms and how they often employ editors, a job often viewed as producing a ‘subtractive’ element or a ‘cut’ – it’s also a labour that is often rarely examined in the processes of production. Of course, I have an interest in this subject, but I wondered what your thoughts on editors might be – whether you use one or not?



For my fictional writing, yes, I use an editor – I have a literary agent and my novel was edited and generally recomposed in deep collaboration with the publisher. And likewise for my essayistic writing, but less so. For the videos, I make the editing decisions, the cuts, sequencing myself. Somebody wrote in the context of my work recently, ‘even Gertrude Stein had an editor’, which I found both hilarious and hurtful because its angry cynicism entirely missed the operative devotion! And equally the pleasure.

Your writing takes on a certain schematic way of parsing meaning – there is often a repeating of an opening phrase of a sentence, such as ‘I am’ or ‘What is’. With each repetition we try and construct a set of relations between things, but they ultimately and playfully seem to undo any given order of relations – at least in any obvious way. It is as if you use these kinds of schemata to enable descriptive words to become unmoored from their functioning use in a sentence, placing us somewhere materially odd. Sometimes this can feel almost suffocating, like wanting to take a breath back to some cognitive order – indeed, even the voice-over reminds herself to take a breath. Could you talk a little about how you conceptualize listing in your writing?



All words seek to rove and migrate, with their phonetic structures offering rules to be manipulated or stylized. Language incorporates whilst simultaneously being dislodged from concrete signifiers. The way a word is formed by the lips as languorous or repetitive, spiky or dripping thus shifts the first legibility of its register by the ear, then the mind’s eye. The circuitry is dialled up or down, guided by both motivated language modelling and social arbitrariness. The same is true for material, and its implementation over shape and space. Meaning is held and then kicked away. There are deliberate edges and shadow carriers in those gaps. The list could be thought of as a tactic of calculated expansion – a rapid means of pushing things together, but also, by virtue of the spoken or typographic format, creating productive gaps in which exponential newness arises. We are dealing with already laden discursive indexes, because language and its corresponding world-substances are ancient. They are baggage. And the list is a means of temporarily containing this elasticity. I love Lucy Ellmann’s 

 (2019) because it is exactly this kind of knowing expansion – a literal run-on of incidence and emotive flirtations that harbour all manner of semantic pathologies and therefore irritations. The list is a formal conundrum in this sense, because on first glimpse it is expedience, but what it actually tethers is sublime density. And I suppose that is the grand metaphor of contemporaneity: we have become masters of generating skins to rename objects, to falsely instil volume on emptiness and to reactivate substance with a glib performativity.



I remember hearing you describe, several years ago at the opening of your show at the Serpentine, how the process between drawing your work in CAD and its physical rendering for a gallery space is merciless in its translation – meaning that there is little alteration in the transference between two- and three-dimensional realms. I had never heard the word merciless ever used in the context of making art before – I wonder if you still feel the same way about the process between drawing and making?



Ha! Yes! I still think making of all kinds is merciless, but that mercilessness also accrues a delirious aggregation of pleasure. It’s not an uncomplicated satisfaction, but it isn’t merciless in the mode of masochism, either! I recently wrote about a friend’s work and described the process of a painter’s desire to conflate visual-linguistic operations as comedically akin to the cannibal or serial killer – a looped transcript of obsessive slicing and sticking back together again. There is some facetiousness here, but also genuine intent in the idea of finding the generative through pleasurable mess – through error, through distortion, through forcing your way between translation and towards something 

. Drawing is hugely important to me: drawing for actual works on paper, drawing to diagram, drawing to sketch, and drawing to catch and to catalogue. Drawing also as a kind of listing. I use it in very different speeds. What I meant about the ‘merciless’ translation between CAD space and real space is the deception of labour – there is so much ruthless detail and planning involved, and when something’s inherent material language is part of the hermetic process of fabrication, that is often simply not legible to an audience. Ask most people how any object on the table in front of them is made and they will be unable to break down even a few stages of the mechanics of its arrival in the world. It is fascinating to me to understand how that knowledge can be wielded and sublimated, how you can use the audibility of process at many different levels. The mercilessness I speak about is also to say that nothing is arbitrary. Each component belongs to a beginning intent that is held and carried through to the end. Of course, intuitive mannerisms occur, accident occurs, but the parts and their 

 moments are really defined right at the beginning.



You have mentioned the writing of Bernard Tschumi and his architectural treatise 

, dating from the late 1970s. The writing quite radically considers time, event and motion in relation to architecture, and his observation that ‘when spaces and events are functionally independent of one another, one observes a strategy of indifference in which no architectural considerations depend on utilitarian ones, in which space has one logic and events another’, seemed somehow prescient here.

 I’m interested in this idea of indifference and how your work seems to generate unexpected frictions, or bring things into play that are otherwise unrelated. Tschumi’s quote also brings to mind the high modernism of the gallery model itself – personally, I don’t view your work as functionally independent of or indifferent to the spaces it inhabits during the course of an exhibition, but I wondered what your thoughts might be here?

I love Tschumi’s writing and thinking, but I agree with you that the characterization of indifference might equally miss the idea of a given site’s contemporary flexibility, its multiple readings. Tschumi’s preoccupations somehow set the idea of the ‘state’ model and the ‘family’ or domestic model crashing together under conditions that restore primacy to the fixed concepts of form, measurement and mathematics: phobia and function. I’m totally into that idea, because it is part of architecture’s invitation to engage with its crassly symbolic persuasions. But there is definitely a whiff of heteronormativity in his writings that especially misses the energetic nuances of social or spatial queerness. Tschumi understands how to invent volumes that simultaneously constitute assurance and nefarious exploit. I also love that. I think 

 is a radically inspirational text. To imagine that a bench or a bush might be explicitly responsible for, or a reportable witness to, a suicide or a crime is an eccentric principle, but it also describes the radical overlap of the world’s addictively rhyming energies. He diagrams public space into the private space in a method that produces theatrical grammar akin to novelistic writing. Personally, when I am making work, its site-specificity is important because it necessitates on a very basic level how symbols can be manipulated or excerpted. I often mirror parts of a building within the work itself – conceptual markers of literal compass points; windows; the floor plan of walls projecting theoretically upwards and retranslated into the layout of other works, for example. So yes, I think space and logic belong to the same type of transcript, but you can dial in and out of their respective visibilities.



I guess not unrelated here is also Sara Ahmed’s writing on use, and the deliberate provocation of misuse as a way to queer or interrupt normative patterns of relations. Do you see your writing as producing different desiring arrangements?



Definitely! I always think about how the primary operative index of a tool, for instance, is male-dominated – the historicized function of it belongs with total and unflinching hegemony to the patriarchy. I think it is interesting that subculture and queerness has coopted that masculinity. The possibilities of utility fracturing out to adoption by unapologetic sexuality, by kitsch or generative pornography is beautiful. I think my work absolutely has a commitment to queerness that is not necessarily about a political positioning of gender or sexuality, but about the methods of 

 that allow a tonal kind of shading to appear in both words and materials. That ‘shading’ is the pertinent point – the degree by which anything chooses to become visible. And that visibility may also come unannounced or unlocatable, and that is part of the inexhaustibility of creating plural content. I think this idea of deliberate misuse might also be why animals so frequently appear in my work – the bestial apocalypse!

 observation of someone 'feeling' themselves ‘becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put’, seems somehow relevant when looking at your work.

 Or least it came to my mind when viewing your films, not least the vertiginous sense of the constructed digital image and the emptiness beyond what has been coded.



I love Caillois. Imagine the end of a human form as darkness, and thus dust. Fittingly, dust is the antithesis to the digital realm. In theory it is everything technology detests, but in reality it gathers on everything, on all our devices, our structural preservations, so there is an uncomfortable if not inevitable coupling. In making digital animation, the beginning process is in some ways comparable to sweeping a surface – clearing the counter for action. Layering skins and light in an algorithmic precision of tool adoption that is actually incredibly fleshy, creating renders in CGI involves deftness of movement. There’s rigging and calculation, so a deeply tactile, hand-skilled nod to traditional set design or model making. In piecing everything together, there is a haptic intensity to the physical labour, but this is a quality that is completely stripped out once the image is rendered. The final look of digital animation is seamlessly gorgeous, terrifying, airless. It is impossible to look around the corners, to judge the temperature. It is as if in the process of compiling, of cutting, editing and re-sampling, there’s a forcing of breath (of life!) into image. And then with each sealing off of the layers, of smoothing out the curves and filling in the weights with texture, colour or light, these breaths become sharper and sharper. The more realistic the digital becomes, the more restricted its breathing, until there is no space for excess air beyond the shell of the render. So, paradoxically, the more gorgeous and impenetrable a digital image becomes, the more brutal a set of masks it suggests, and the less life it lets in. The animation is impossibly lifeless, but incredulously animated. This is long-established fact in digital processing.

Writing A Play (dark blue orchard)

Evan Ifekoya

Kick drum pattern, hi-hat sequence, ‘the bass is pulsing through’. Disco! Too much work. The picket line! Bad news. Evan Ifekoya’s 2014 video work 

 sends mixed signals. The disco ball is already spinning with gusto – and it’s still being made, by hand, from scratch. Archival footage of people bouncing through the tail end of the twentieth century is interspersed with close-ups of manual labour and Facebook timelines that look threateningly contemporary. The form of the work is clearly 

, but casually so: the artist-as-pop-star starring in it, played by Ifekoya themselves, has too much going on to really be bothered.

, like the best tracks in the genre, stems from the sequencing of several disparate historical layers: there are of course the glitzy 1980s colour schemes, MTV-era conventions, geometrical outfit choices. Part of this zeitgeist is sampled from found footage collected in the Prelinger archive, a collection dedicated precisely to ephemeral moving images of everyday life that would otherwise fly under the historical radar. On another level, however, this revival feels specific to a particular era of the internet that is also already historical: the beat is imbued with a bounce specific to the types of electroclash that emerged from pirated music production software in the 2000s; the montage style has gloriously goofy iMovie undertones. In a 2018 essay for 

, Ifekoya writes: ‘The way I relate to music today is the result of having had access to the internet from a young age.’

 They cite the magical anonymity of online forums, the ‘infinite libraries’ of Napster and Soulseek as templates for how they began to live with sound. In 2014, of course, thisversion of onlineness, its thrills of social experimentation and DIY cultural production, its promise of new political forms, had 

 mostly vanished into monetization, giving way to the addictive bombardment of bad news that has since been cutting into global attention spans. But in 

, a faint echo of internet optimism can at least still be constructed through sampling, in this case, through disco. If one could certainly come across a tonally similar, if less poignant, music video spoof on TikTok now, we can’t even access 

 is full of, by way of nostalgia anymore.

In a similar vein, when Ifekoya goes, ‘all these bad news on my Twitter feed’: what registered as 

 in 2014? As a decade sits awkwardly in the uncanny valley between not-the-present-anymore and not-quite-yet-history, one might have to google the specifics (at least I did): in February, Russia sent troops into Ukraine in an operation that would result in the annexation of Crimea. The summer of 2014 also saw over two thousand Palestinians killed in the deadliest twenty-first-century assault on Gaza before the current war. On 10 August, a day after a cop shot eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, protests began to foreshadow what we know now was a decade of uprisings against anti-Black police violence. So much of 2024 could be broken down to the escalation of the long 2014, and yet the playfulness of 

is a reminder of just how recently the scale of these world-historical disasters felt completely different: not necessarily less grave, but less doomed.

Against this backdrop, Ifekoya’s video stages an internal conflict that unfolds along at least four axes, once more (with feeling): bad news; the picket line; the studio; the discotheque. In other words, perhaps: history unfolding beneath our scrolling fingers; the necessity to organize in the face of it; the demands of work (which in this case, crucially, is artistic labour); and, lastly, pleasure, or maybe more simply, sweat, including someone else’s sweat. The ancient questions of getting through a Friday night in a late capitalist Western metropolis – questions that the very form of the music video deeply resonates with: Should I go out tonight? Can I afford to go out, in terms of workload, body battery, money? In terms of craving some time off, can I afford not to go out? In 

, Ifekoya refuses to resolve this conflict, to prioritize any of the wobbly variables in this problem in the name of hedonism, pragmatism or activism. The non-resolution that the video is propelled by is absurdly funny: are we supposed to understand that the protagonist mulling over their decision, instead of committing to either of these activities (the deadline, nightlife, strike action), is simply … procrastinating? Elaborately crafting a disco ball? Dancing and singing, yes, but 

bearing witness to the state of the world at the pace of the Facebook timeline? Procrastination as a way of holding contradictory social pressures, if for a moment, at bay?

In this context, Ifekoya’s performance style, too, is instructive: in interviews in the mid-2010s, the artist talked about wanting to refuse, in their work, the exoticized spectacle that pop culture often makes of Black dancers. Against this history, Ifekoya’s music video star offers the virtuosic 

 of pop culture’s aesthetic conventions: their dance moves resonate with a low intensity, not restrained but gleefully cool, heartfelt but not sentimental. This refusal makes the brief moment of release that pop offers in 

 feel less like a dramatically cathartic antidote to the woes of everyday life, but rather messy and tangible like everyday life itself, which is to say, more real. More fun.

In critical reception, the tone of the video has often been read as either self-flagellating (as in, ‘I should be at the picket line’) or hedonistic, but perhaps it can also be understood as cheerfully analytical. It conveys an antsy need of having to think – and dance – through the various demands, conditions and desires of the contemporary workday in relation to each other: without pitting them against each other, without simply conflating them. At the time, in 2014, artistic labour still seemed, to some, as the Platonic ideal of the so-called ‘new work’ environments that threatened to expand even deeper into personal life. Few curatorial statements could dispense with terms like immaterial labour, the entrepreneurial self, etc.The avant-garde artist abolishing the difference between work and life briefly appeared as 

paradigmatic worker. Although clearly in conversation with this discursive moment, Ifekoya’s work de-dramatizes this perspective. In 

, the artist is a worker who, like most workers, is just craving a night out.

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