Xingyu Xie

This book drawn on several weeks of WeChat correspondence between my mother and I during our self-quarantine, interwoven alongside the correspondence were the pages from a novel by the French writer Georges Perec — W, or The Memory of Childhood. Intermittently, my mother shoots the pages and sometimes read to me. In this back and forth communication, we talked about family, changes, love and death. Yesterdays were floating faintly on everyday objects in the room, getting lighter and lighter.

Then I made the following short film "March, April, May, June".

"Je les pose sur la table
ils parlent tout seuls je m'en vais."

— Jean Tardieu, "Outils posés sur une table"

an envelope
a roll of 100m thread
a house after tearing the wallpaper

A near-failed Mirror Touch Synesthesia self experiment.

After read Daria Martin's book Mirror Touch Synesthesia: The Threshold of Empathy with Art in Wellcome Collection. I imagined and attempted to set a physical, performative and material parameters for sensual and synaesthetic experience.

I built “an angry room” full of mirrors and used an electric motor to spin a ball at constant speed and touch my cheek twice a second. In this iterative process, visual and tactile synchronous stimuli were accidental and transient, vertigo dominated the sensory experience...I recorded this long hour with a pen and a stack of a4 paper, a voice recorder and two cameras.

2019