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ECHO TOURS: PARIS
performance (40 min), 2024, at UP-ON International Live Art Festival in A4 museum, Chengdu
Echo Tours is a guided walking “eco-tour” based on the premise that it is more green to fly one tour guide over to China than have all the audience members go to Paris. Echoing across space, time and language, the guide and the translator welcome the artsy crowd and set off on a brisk walk through the city’s main tourist attractions. The magic and splendour of Paris is evoked in the grounds of the A4 museum (standing in for both Centre Pompidou and the Louvre museum), by transposing iconic Parisian sites onto vaguely similar features of the European-inspired gated community of Luxetown, Chengdu. Paris, in this performance (or as one local resident was overheard calling it: scam), represents the unattainable dream of seizing a nostalgic and romantic mirage: seen from afar, the fantasy remains intact. This simulated tourist experience questions the existence of authenticity; like the Eiffel Tower keychain handed out at the end of the tour, it is but a simulacra of what has already been replaced.
Collaborator: Zoe Li Wenwen 李文雯 Graphic Design: Xiao Ruyun 肖如云 Photography: Ran Qizhuo 冉启卓, Hu Yujie 胡雨捷 Videography: Shui Yuntong 水运通, Ah Si 阿西 ꀊꑞ
With the support of Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council
APHRODISIACS UPDATED
a slow dating event hosted during the exhibition 𝙄𝙣 𝙇𝙤𝙫𝙚 ;* curated by Paloma Ayala and tracy september at Les Complices*, Zürich, 2024.This slow dating event was based on Audre Lorde expanded definition of the erotic – a life force that can animate every aspect of our lives by putting us in contact with the untapped energy that comes from a bodily awareness of our capacity for joy, that lets us lead fuller and richer lives by connecting with our own joy and sharing that emotion with others.
A South East Asian meal of vegan rendang was served, together with tumeric rice and Nonya achar, a labour of love that is not just mine. It was infused with the care that I put into cooking it and steeped with the tweaks and the tips that have traversed the webs of relationships that connect these recipes to their associated memories of taste. Guiding questions and prompts about food, sex, relationships, desire, empowerment, etc were placed on the table to help lubricate conversation, and diners were invited to trust themselves and each other, to expose themselves, to be vulnerable, in order to make a connection with the fellow humans at their table.
Photos: Kay Zhang
HELP YOURSELF
performance (13 min) and installation, 2023, at Gulp an exhibition curated by Clara Chavan and Katia Leonelli at La Rada, Locarno.Help Yourself is a performance that features a hungry character pedalling through a rhythmic training program. Guided by the music and an automated voice, the character cycles while repeating affirmations that mix maxims of self help and motivational slogans, eyes fixed all the while on a slice of cake suspended in front of them. A crescendo, the character is told to reach for their goals and duly attempts to grab the cake. They pull on it and release a flurry of cash that they dive to devour. The performance ends with the character panting on the floor after having gorged themselves on money.
Sound design: Louis Dambrain
Cake engineering: Fig Docher
Outside eyes: Jonas Van, Gemma Ushengewe, Orfeo Aurora Lili, Basile Collet, Fig Docher, Louis Dambrain
Photos: Riccardo Giancola
BREAKING NEWS
video (13 min) and installation, shown at Grad Show HEAD–Genève, 2022, foodculture days’ biennale, Vevey, 2023, 798 Cube, Beijing, 2024Breaking News is a video based on an investigation into greenwashed contemporary land grabbing for sugar and bioethanol production in Cambodia and Brazil. It investigates how the links between agro- and petrochemical industries are sustained by an internalised belief in a nature-society divide and an adherence to the fictive value of money. Situated at the intersection between social and environmental justice, the economic and juridic aspects of commodification and desire-making are seen and unseen from a decolonial perspective through the transmutability of Green.
Collaborators: Gabriel Shields-Hanau, Sawsane Hema, Gemma Ushengewe, Fig Docher, Louis Dambrain, RuYun Xiao, Mikhail Rokhjov