The project re-tells stories of inter-species co-existence and the more-than-human collaborative survival through exploring filmmaking as collective resistance. Working with waste materials in societal terms, could we channel an alternative energy, beyond its extractive capitalistic connotations, composting through forgotten work songs and lost oral traditions. Unearthing the more-than-human relationships with the sun, opposing the working conditions of crops under the fast cycles of industrial agriculture, the embodiment of non-extractive energy encompasses from animals, flora, people, rocks, rivers, trees, to rhythms. The tradition of ‘work songs’, manifested in the cycles of growth, decay, production and decomposition, in organisms and their relation with one another, is also always evolving. as Denise da Silva suggested In ‘On Difference Without Separability’ - ‘What if, instead of the Ordered World, we imaged each existant (human and more-than-human) not as separate forms relating through the mediation of forces, but rather as singular expressions of each and every existant as well as the entangled whole in/as which they exist'. Tracing the genealogy of the diaspora and revealing the possibility of myths to act as a resisting force against capitalist and colonial homogeneity, how could the residual stories from the actual metabolism of history be rewritten, reused and switched?
Xiyao Chen (b.Guangdong, based in London) is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and filmmaker operating across territories of digital anthropology, moving images, media design and agroecology. Her practice and research focus is driven in response to the imminent climate crisis and rethinking the entangled hybrid environments where human, machine and nature coexist interdependently, where distinctions between the organism and machine, physical and virtual have become increasingly leaky. Amid the entanglement, her works seek to challenge traditional forms of storytelling, by weaving mythology and technology, straddling meanings and feelings, bodily experience without bodies.