Debtford

Their hybrid forms and body parts a patchwork amalgamation of different tree types, this tree is a climate adaptative response, a lifeform born out of resilience and hope. As the spirit inhabiting the tree emerges to converse with the viewer, they share with us their experiences of ecocidal generational trauma, urging us to reflect around the ways all the beings on the planet are deeply interlinked, and to honour our collective responsibility towards one another. Using a blend of 3D animation, found footage, and a musical score based on data sonification, ‘Rainforest Canopy’ uses the speculative to recast the ecological crisis, asking ‘Why is this important?’ from a multispecies and affective gaze.

~ Here; come, restore, replenish, relax. Crafting a better world is not an easy adventure. Rest with me. ~ An experimental documentary exploring the meanings of rest: political, spiritual, tied to labour, associated with guilt. The film is Chapter R of April Lin’s long-term project, "An A-Z of Imagining A Better World", and serves as a reminder of rest as a structurally-negated necessity, a muscle worth training, and an essential strategy in the process toward liberation for all.

now i close my eyes the world i see is so beautiful samples lines from Taiwanese New Wave film Yi Yi, in which a young girl speaks to the ghost of her grandmother. These intergenerational whisperings inspire April Lin to follow their own adventures with their grandfather, pondering how ancestors and descendants create bridges across time, and if you’re diasporic – across global space.

An interdimensional correspondence between two beings sharing queer kinship and rooted in ‘ta’, the monosyllabic sound which in Mandarin Chinese encompasses all third person pronouns: 他 (third person male), 她 (third person female), and 它 (more-than-human lifeforms and objects). This experimental, narrative-led speculative fiction follows an exchange of internal letters between two protagonists who imagine one another across parallel dimensions. Each communicates to an envisioned other, who exists as a possibility beyond their self-perceived boundaries of reality, and these two beings meet in a shared world of imagination. In this reciprocal reach for the unknown, a world that bears an uncanny resemblance to our contemporary reality – colonised by Western capitalist constructs of race, gender and class, and characterised by a collective distance from Ta – opens a portal to another realm.

Reality Fragment 160921 follows two people in their process of reality-curation, as they create their own spaces against and via understandings of distance, as they go through the motions of growing themselves by growing their universes.