Small Act

2024, 2 channel video installation, duration 6’25”
Video exerpt 


Can the physical and emotional exhaustion of individuals be staved off so that movements don’t exhaust themselves altogether? In Small Act: A Patient (Ins)urgency of Political Defeat, Maoyi Qiu proposes questions around the construction and deconstruction of bodies through the interplay between social movements and psychic transformation. A video essay assembles the asynchronicity of social actions and the gloomy granularity of everyday forms of tiredness and explores whether it is possible to overcome these in the absence of transformed social relations. This is a burning question among modern-day activists: “They found that they could not change their desires or behaviors overnight to live according to their political principles, feeling out of sync or experiencing psychic lag,” writes Hannah Proctor in Burn Out: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (2024).