Embankment

Embankment 25 minutes, 2007 video installation with 2 flat screen monitors and 2 waterbeds

Embankment begins as a research project into a site-specific space of the Three Gorges Dam and reservoir along the Yangtze River and the submerged landscapes that surround it.  The submerged landscape doubles at once as an imaginary landscape that can be recalled only subjectively, and a physical landscape that is constantly having its borders redefined. An embankment is a point of contact for elements that are both complimentary and contradictory: land and water, self and stranger, and science and fiction. Through these contradictions, Embankment explores the notion of a migrating subjectivity.

Narratives referring to life along the Yangtze River, becomes an ephemeral document about the varied milieux along the Three Gorges Reservoir.  Memory plays an extensive role in these performances. The specificity of the Three Gorges Dam shadows all narratives in the various communities that the film presents. The changed landscape and the collection of stories become the non-site of the submerged cities and the soon to become mythic past.

The project is the process of an investigation that manifests as a video document.  It actively seeks to engage site-specific art practices while questioning these methods as well as the practice of documentary and filmmaking.  A rendering that simultaneously exposes facets of the filmmakers’ subjectivity, as well as that of their performing subjects.  It examines the prospects of how to make a work about vision when one could never embody someone else’s point of view.  The definition of being a foreigner extends from being in a strange land to being a lover or a collaborator.