Video (completed)

The House, The Flat, The Apartments (aka La Casa 1-2-3) (中文版)
2017.02, 41 minutes 12 seconds / Hong Kong

construction

from part 3 of trilogy: "apartments"

 

A Linda Lai video / Visual Auto-Ethnography / color / 16:9 / Hong Kong

SYNOPSIS

La Casa 1-2-3 (The House, the Flat, the Apartments) is a combined trilogy in one which contemplates the living space as an expression of personality. Footage of a house in Las Palmas, a flat and 4 apartments I have had in Hong Kong and New York (1996-2017) pieces together the timeless inward-ness of several very different living spaces. Silence and fragmentary ambient sounds, recomposed into a subjective image- and soundscape call for a dialectic relation between seeing, hearing and knowing.

CONCEPT

La Casa 1-2-3 is a trilogy combined into one work, a visual ethnographic sketch of three domestic spaces closely connected to me, each part with a different sight-and-sound approach. The first is a house of a bourgeois family in Las Palmas, Spain, where my husband grew up. The second is a tiny flat in a public housing estate in Hong Kong, where my four siblings and I grew up. Part 3 is a series of apartments, from Manhattan to Hong Kong, where my husband and I moved from one to the next in the past 20 years.

“The House, The Flat, The Apartment,” another way to call this work, contemplates the living space as an expression of personality, as well as the ornaments that form its signature. Footage of a house in Las Palmas, a flat and four apartments in Hong Kong and New York (1996-2017) pieces together the timeless inward-ness of several very different living spaces. Silence and fragmentary ambient sounds, recomposed into a subjective image- and soundscape call for a dialectic relation between seeing, hearing and knowing. To me, the camera and cinema has a unique role to play in archiving such imprints. I then glean the surpluses, among which also traces of our world of commodities.

“The House”
Footage of the same house from 2001-2013 pieces together the timeless inwardness of a middle-class living space in Las Palmas, Spain, where the departed live on with the material imprints that speak of their own ways of participating in history.

To trace the traces of those living and once lived, and to grab the etui of the person …, this video alludes to such a process by me, a cultural outsider for a house I have intimate connection. On the interior of the bourgeois home, W. Benjamin comments, “For the private person, living space becomes…antithetical to the place of work.” In shaping his private environment, the private citizen participates in history; s/he “gathers remote places and the past.”  As a video essay, “The House” articulates my urge for intimate connections with the house in Las Palmas. But what could an outsider like me understand? What is accessible is the furniture and ornaments, which my camera captures.

“The Flat”
The second part depicts my parents’ home in Hong Kong. Although it also shows a domestic interior, as an insider I relate to this space very differently, with a deep-rooted understanding of the logic behind its organization from the start. Focusing for the most part on the small ornamental objects in the flat, I highlighted the everyday creativity of my mother, as expressed by her decorations and arrangements. She has instilled her own personality into the house with the limited resources that she has.
As my parents-in-law and my own father passed away in recent years, this video alludes to death, naturally. They have spent their whole life embellishing their homes, but eventually they have departed/will depart one by one, leaving behind an uninhabited living space marked by their personality. But the departed live on, in the form of the material imprints that speak of their own ways of participating in history. The video essay thus shows the process of tracing the traces of those living and once lived.

“The Apartments”
Disclosing my living space is disclosing an intimate side of my own life. It is no easy job. As a visual ethnography, I took distance and found patterns documented in my own video diaries (1996-2017): loads of books, a lot of house-moving, heavy job to move with loads after loads of books, weather the unnoticed perennial backdrop, together forming a saga of “progress” in which we were only on-lookers. There was always a lot of construction, endless construction, and whitewashing… Good and bad monumental moments of history from around the world creep in through the TV box. We wonder: when is it possible to have a decent window view?

KEYWORDS: visual ethnography, home, interior of a bourgeois home, objects, everyday creativity, Hong Kong, Las Palmas, public housing interior, Spain, Hong Kong, New York, raining, progress, urban space, demolition and construction

Photography /Image Narrative /Sound/Editing: Linda LAI 黎肖嫻 /

 

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[Screening/Exhibition history放映/展出紀錄]

COMING SOON

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The-house2

居所一、二、三

2017, 41' 12“

COMING SOON...

 

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製作資料

攝影/聲效/剪接:
黎肖嫻