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• NOWHERE

  BY NICOLA FORNONI

  An abandoned NATO base built during the Cold War on a mountain pass linking three valleys to each other in north Italy. Old business lines, passageways and other morphological peculiarities. Sound waves, cymbal vibrations and fake animal puppies mark an imaginary sense of the time passing. The landscapes around take on ascetic and fleeting colours. Those zones that were once controlled from now on are a way out. The senses conjugate an escape trajectory from the body to the sky. The video consists of three chapters. Each of them begins with a description of emotions. The story develops through symbols concerning identity, presence, existence and condition. Documentary scenes alternate with anatomical frames. Keeping direction straight on, the protagonist discovers new territories—nowhere is everywhere. He trespasses and tracks them down with his orthopaedic devices, migrating from a tunnel’s darkness to the light, like a miner who reaches the surface after spending endless moments in the depths of the earth where the rumble of metal makes its way through the rocks.
• 萬語千言 WISH YOU WERE HERE

  BY Wen Yau

  “On the white canvases covering the wooden structure of a cellar room (of approximately 10 square meters), I repeatedly wrote in Chinese '我要真普選' (I want real universal suffrage) with willow charcoal made in China. This slogan has been used widely in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement and represents the people's demand for freedom and democracy. I travelled to Venice when the major occupy site outside Central Government Offices was about to be cleared by police in Hong Kong. A programme of selected video documentaries of or work by artists in Hong Kong themed ‘Performing Civil Struggles: in-between conformity and resistance in Hong Kong (2004-2014)’, curated by me for the VIPAW (Venice International Performance Art Week), was showing in the next room. As an active participant in the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, my installation/performance manifested not only my confessions of being away, but also my solidarity with other protesters at home, and an intense meditation on a series of civil struggles in decades. In my live performance on 15 December 2014, when the last major occupy site was being cleared in Causeway Bay, I blindfolded myself with the 5-star flag of PRC and repeatedly wrote the same slogan again on the canvas. Messy, scribbled or uncontrolled, the blind writing layered the canvases with my mixed feelings about the civil struggles in Hong Kong: devoted and persistent yet vulnerable, isolated or even imprisoned by one's own promise. On 18 December 2014, the 6th day of the 2nd VIPAW (Venice International Performance Art Week), I presented a tele-performance through webcasting from Hong Kong. I lind-walked around the Central Government Offices at midnight when there was almost nobody there. After my emotional outbreaks during my performance in Venice, this blind walking took me back to the locale of the protests in the past few months and where the Umbrella Movement originated. The remoteness of my performance as shown by live-feed video projection on my recurring writings of ‘我要真普選’ (I want real universal suffrage) in Venice corresponded to the emptiness and solitude of the place which had been occupied in the past 3 months and cleared a week ago. This action also offered me a chance to meditate on the unseen future of the civil struggles in Hong Kong and re-discover the overlooked micro-history on a personal level.”
• METAMORS

  BY FRANCESCA FINI

  Metamors is a colorful vortex that transports the observer to a dreamlike dance between the veil of being and the abyss of becoming. Each mask is an echo, a shard of stars and stories woven into the threads of the female soul's polyhedral mosaic. The artist, the Sibyl of a Thousand Faces, wears masks that speak the names of deities, warriors, witches, and dreamers in this hallucinogenic garden of fluid lights and shifting shadows. But be cautious! The masks are dishonest artificers who play with our perception of reality. They are gateways into digital realms, worlds of pixels and code, places where being a woman is a kaleidoscope of unlimited possibilities.