Every lost story is a hungry ghost (2024)
video (1:06, looped), textile, essay, audio (23:51)
This work examines the possibility of grief as a foundation for new life in both tangible and intangible ways. Specifically, I focus on the constant cycles of decay and rebuilding of lives, histories, and ways of seeing that become lost or buried.
I wrote and recorded a lyric essay that explores water’s significance to intergenerational loss, migration, and the symbolic gestures of rituals. The audio plays as the video continues on an infinite loop of its own, a nod to the constant cycles dissected in the essay.
The video work features the last footage I have of a rotting historical gangway on the Hudson River to a turn of the century steamboat turned restaurant turned wreck.
The essay reflects on how, in the absence of direct knowledge, new generations (post-migration) often work without awareness of their predecessors. Whether it’s culturally significant rituals or the long fight for civil rights, those who experience intergenerational loss use these gaps to create something else.
Commissioned by curator Anna Jin Hwa Borstam for a solo exhibition in August–October at Krognoshuset in Lund, Sweden. This work was made in response to Krognoshuset’s unique architecture. Audio recorded and edited with support from Inter Arts Center in Malmö, Sweden.
Photos by Mårten Lange.