Underscore #1

Video Excerpt,
14’45”

Video editing: Maoyi Qiu
Sound design & composition: Maoyi Qiu
Performing Art Forum(PAF), St. Erme, France.


Text references: Unnamed sources from 3 activists in China, Fred Morton /Naomi Shihab Nye/Susan Rothenberg/Jaana Parviainen/Sara ahmed

The video follows a speculative conversation and self-documentation of the anonymous protagonist's seemingly stubborn moving body. Through a eerie presentation of the exchanged conversation and the consistency of movement, haunted by the constant gaze in the digital sphere, the work touch upon the topics in relation to somatic resistance, politics of the moving body and the sociality of technological control.

The work driven by the case from a group of activists who are stranded and relocated in mainland China and HK due to political pressure. Their somatic and textural correspondence unfolds a series of questions on exhaustion, traumatic memories, and surveillance refugees. The work wants to draw attention to the somatic intelligibility under technological control, in rethinking the notion of a ‘movement’, its potentiality in both metaphorical and literal senses, and how it can become transformative modes of resistance.