Son[i]a #410
Wu Tsang
The impossible image
What I care about is process
Tools to shift reality
Pulling from the real and the fictional
Thinking through a blockbuster opera
Cliché
Messing with the myth
Who is 'They' and this world
Pretending to be an Individual person
The collaborative model of film production
Language without language
Translation
Improv as a dream filmset scenario
It is Important to dislocate as much as to locate
Filmmaker and visual artist Wu Tsang explores the complexities of what she calls the ‘impossible’ image: between slippery lived experience and that which the camera manages to capture. Tsang embraces this difficulty as a generative space of possibility and an opportunity for transformation. She does so while moving between video installation, performance, documentary practice and fiction, by focusing on identities that do not fit the dominant narratives, both through everyday experience and through counter-canonical reworkings of classic myths and stories.
Her works deal with communities, alterities and lived experiences, in dialogue and conversation with others. Her approach to film practice and performance is shared by interdisciplinary group Moved by the Motion, which she co-founded with fellow artist Tosh Basco and which includes regular collaborators such as Josh Johnson, Asma Maroof and Fred Moten. Processes of collective creation run through all her projects, including her recent collaboration with the PIE.FMC independent platform of modern and contemporary flamenco studies (Pedro G. Romero, Joaquin Vázquez and Enrique Fuenteblanca), and with her favourite editor, Jérôme Pesnel.
In this podcast, we talk to Wu Tsang about her way of understanding (and practicing) the ungraspable nature of the moving image through her concept of magic realism, as well as other reality-modification strategies. We talk about big and small stories, about myths and clichés, and about rewriting and unravelling timelines, part real and part fictional. We also look at the benefits of collaborative processes and at the need to challenge and dismantle the idea of individual authorship in the visual arts.
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