Physical Archive (1) ‘What is Physical?‘
Whilst we continue to work within the time frame of the solar terms albeit with reduced mobility, the films and works that are inspired by activities in the village have taken on more fundamental questions.
During the Time of Lesser Cold in early January 2020 props for the Qilin dance, which is traditionally performed on the eve of the New Lunar Year, are made. This year, Qilin Master Mu Zongpai came to the studio to show his chosen successor, He Jixing, how to make the props. All the while, conversations about the essence of rituals occurred sporadically. This film is a composition of visuals with spoken text and a song that emerged from the first encounter between visiting musicians from Brazil and China and the landscape.
In March 2020, the annual Pear Blossom Festival organised by MCC and the village community in Ciman (see also Three VIllage Circular) had to be cancelled due to COVID-19. Instead Hewenzhao invited artists living close by to create work for online publication along the lines of "improvised art on the theme of plants".
He Jixing and myself (Petra Johnson), both resident artists at Lijiang Studio as well as part of the curatorial team here, decided to create a sound piece. Together with villagers, we directed the current topical question ‚What makes a living organism feel welcome?’ toward the local. Ciman Village is famous for and proud of its pear and we framed our sound recorded walk with the question ‚Why did the Pear choose to flourish here?’.
We did so by foregrounding voice and rhythm. The work not only ’tells’ outside the visual system but also by unmooring semantics: Naxi is an unwritten language spoken by only 300.000 people. And finally we appropriated a local genre: GuQi. This form of improvised folksong revolves around a centralised core which is repeatedly developed. In this instance the core is a question circling habitat selection. There are six acts, each comes with an introduction in English.
RETURNS
In November 2020, Zhao Caoxi, a journalist for the Design Magazine Demo, asked me some interesting questions about my time at Lijiang Studio. It prompted me to reflect. My replies to her questions can be found on https://independent.academia.edu/PetraJohnson