Agency, Materiality and Alternative Archiving (Screening)

I’d like to present two short films I made in the past two years in China. They all took place in the same city, Guangzhou, a southern metropolitan with long history of vernacular civil culture and migrant flows. In the films, I went to two different kinds of enclaves in the city, the African commerce neighborhood and domestic urban village. Instead of finding a character, a story as the "other", I made different sort of dialogues with the human and nonhuman actors while traversing these layered landscape. Through materializing the agency of the invisible, an alternative archive of was also created, on the fleeting impulse, the vanishing composition and the unrepeatable encounter.

Films:

Total running time: 39min

1. Letter from Xiaobei
Director: Zimu Zhang
Year: 2017, August
Country: China
Length: 9min

Synopsis: A woman in Ecuador reads a letter from her Chinese friend, telling her about the city Guangzhou and its special African enclave Xiaobei; she reads about her Chinese friend's fear, reflection and for the most part, connection.

2. Just Like Any Other Night
Director: Zheng Lu Xinyuan, Zimu Zhang
Year: 2018, Sep
Length: 29’44

Synopsis:
A ghostly image emerges in the dark, weakly lights up its surrounding —a city ruin awaits renewal. Deep in the darkness, a girl murmurs a scattered diary of her lonely soul amid the city life. An intimate archive of fleeting sensations amid China’s rapid urbanization, especially on the Urban-Village, one of the most drastic scenes of Chinese urbanization. It was realized with
the collaboration of young urban-villagers in Guangzhou, China.