About Artistic Research Feature film in progress Sound Archive: 345 nights Experimental Shorts Expanded Cinema Photography
Spoken word performance, with a video installation, 15 mins.
My language doesn’t belong to a single body ; she isn’t an individual language.
—Mirene Arsanios (Notes on Mother Tongues)
Excerpts from the text
“After she get on the plane, I still refused to go, so they have to sent me back to my friends again. Years later, i heard the Uighur translator guy was dead in the Istanbul airport attack.”
Maybe we’re still walking, or sitting, i don’t know what to respond. At this moment, I don’t trust words anymore. Those unspoken words left in the chat frame, left on the top of our tongue, left on the other side of the phone call, have betrayed us. Especially for her, S, I know those words are still hunting her at night, are they Uighurqe? Mandarin? Or Turkish?
How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded?
How much of this pain
can I use?
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
This is not an easy story to tell.
Narrative
What does it mean to speak in an imprisoned language?
Darya reunites with her cousin after a decade apart, during a time when her cousin is grappling with bipolar disorder. Their struggle is intertwined with the fear and anxiety stemming from the surveillance and pressures faced by Uyghurs in diaspora. As they confront the fear and love tied to speaking their mother tongue in a foreign land, they seek solace and healing in their shared experiences.
This intimate encounter unfolds as a live performance, a text interwoven with footage of their reunion, capturing the complexities of identity, belonging, and the emotional weight of language, as they strive to mend their fractured connection under the shadow of displacement and surveillance.
Link to the performance (with password)
Link to the film (with password)
Performance experience
The artist seat in front of the screen, with a desk. It creates a shadow of the artist. On the desk, there’s box filled with clay objects that were made during their second meeting with the artist’s cousin, when they tried to recreate the day of their reunion after ten years.
The artist perform every time the screen goes dark, two flashlights shone on her face while she speaks.
Set up
(The screen can go smaller)