Quotes of Inspiration,
“ In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense. accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”
“…It is a world-view that actually. Been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.”
“…The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement if the non-living.”
~Guy Derod “ The Society of the Spectacle” (1967)
As a young Taiwanese maker, the urgency of the artistic research on re-membering may be rooted in the struggle of my crisis of cultural identity, further being reflected on the socio-economic state of the contemporary global society.
My Taiwanese identity consists of a foundation of conflict between the cultural, ethnical, and political consciousness and beliefs.
Taiwan is a nation of immigrants of Chinese-rooted Han people throughout centuries who have settled on the island of the indigenous. Both groups have perceived suppression and marginalization from different phases of cultural cleansing by the Chinese Nationalist government (ROC) after 1945 who took over the post-Japanese-colonized Taiwan. It was and still is an ongoing debate, even after the gradual shift to a democratic society from the late 1980s , and the current, where our independence and democracy are still constantly under attack.
Where I live in this world and is born on a land, by people with certain blood roots, I supposedly inherit a “culture”. I will be raised as part of it, influence by how people around speak, eats, learn, live, I will be rightfully part of something.
But what if what the culture we lived in becomes something that was taught but not lived, when one’s cultural identity, the way the world is to been seen and understood is a result of social-ecological structure, a pre-arranged invention, a product,(i.e. cultural propaganda ) what it is for people of the contemporary to grasp onto? What if one's culture may be a result of propaganda, what if the culture one inherited no longer echoes with the contemporary one's living in?
For me, it is re-membering.
Re-Memering, focus on the emphasis on "RE (Again)", to put it back to gather, again. It highlights the action of reconstruction, reexamination, and recalling of what was once experienced. It may be a one time action, but by repetition of one person or a collective, weaving together a new insight of reality.
The act of re-membering, the decision and motion of putting what is lived back together again, in another time, under a certain lens and circumstances. It is to be recalled, reformed and lived on, reclaimed.
“When people set thrust into history and forced to participate in the work and struggles that constitute history, they find themselves obliged to view their relationship in a clear and disabused manner.”
“We may live in a world that can’t be directly grasped. The relentless development of the particular technical rationality that grew out of categories of vision, socio-economic, philosophical, our fundamentals of reality, and more.”
What we can grasp, is what is actually being lived, what has been lived, by individual persons and ourselves.
In my research of re-membering, I’m hoping to initiate movements of social interactions. To harbor a culture of the present tense that’s rooted and discovered in/by the relational.
Culture is not something that is strictly rigid and of the past, it it being continuously formulated by social interactions. We as present living are the makers of cultures, masters of our lived lives.
This is an urge of the subject of consciousness and living experience. “People becoming masters and possessors of their own historical world and of their own fully conscious adventures.”
Futhermore, this initiation and urgency is rooted but not only limited by my Taiwanese context and identity, but a yearning as a person with independent conscious who hopes to understand personhood and ways to reclaim values of the lived everything’s. Formulating this culture of the present tense is also a way of bringing togetherness, to reveal personhood and the world revealed by relation to personhood harbored by groups of collective participants. If one has lived in the society and is the witness and agent of their own experiences, when they decide to partake on the initiated act, the re-membering, they could be part.
This research is inspired by the situationist movement, phenomenological theories and philosophy, a wishing to understand self, self live me, and what we make of the world we’re living in.
