listen to this ruined terrain, where silence hangs in the stench of rot, where what remains (the scorched earth, the ghosted towns, the skeletal structures, the poisoned water) whispers something annihilative. standing before the burial ground of the desert borderland all defense breaks: a despair, a recognition of the price of remaining here at all – our very existence bought at the expense of others. the work mourns the unmournable (the impossibility of mourning), and tries to hold the shattered utterances inconvertible to human language. some images refuse to fade: the flicker of a face in a frame too gruesome to look at twice, atrocities caught on camera of non-human animals torn by human hands, pain inflicted solely for the sake of spectacle and dominion. what is it to walk through each day bearing the shame of belonging to the only species one has the option of being?
the work's obsession is with communication: a painful, maniacal longing to relate to what lies outside. this compulsive desire to open utterly grows so intense that it flays and hollows the self, disgorging its humanness and unravelling the very boundaries of identity – until mania reveals itself not as affliction but rather as a willed descent into madness, in which the all-too-human subject is offered up to that which corrodes and mutates. the force of radical negativity (anguish, rage, grief, shame) works through each gesture, exacting its cost. bodies and instruments serve as vessels, spoken through and infiltrated by something other than themselves: dislocated sonic textures, the insistent pulse of incantation and repetition, estranged electronic sounds, and field recordings that are the residue of ruinous landscapes and ghostly nonhuman presence. what emerges is a ritual of collapse, wherein all boundaries are enmeshed and made fluid: between the human and the other-than-human, the visible and the occluded, the audible and the unspeakable, the self and its undoing.
✴︎ Contact
Ni
nizheng27(at)gmail(dot)com