dear velocity,
Full HD and found footage, color, stereo, 11'24''
Starring: Yueqing Yao
As I tell friends in New York or London that trees in my hometown shed their leaves in spring, they always look at me with incredulity. It wasn’t until much later that I realized my obsession with speed and the urbanscape also had a time difference with the world: the US-USSR Space Race already peaked in the 1980s, but the theme park Space Wonder (航天奇观) in my howntown hadn’t begun construction with funding from local farmers until 1996, the year I was born, as part of the trend of pleasing my generation of children in Guangzhou.
How should we look back at the past in a way that avoids glorifying memory and being consumed by it? When I try to detach from my own perspective and have an actress, ten years younger than me and attending the same high school, reenact those moments, everything gets compressed into aesthetics and semiotics. Is there a way of reenactment that goes beyond mere aesthetic mechanisms? Will the time difference between us and the world ever truly end?
*The replica of NASA Atlantis was dismantled during the post-production process of the film.
喜欢和纽约、伦敦的朋友讲，家乡的行道树总是在春天落叶——后来发现自己喜欢揣摩的是他们脸上的难以置信。也是在不久以后，我才发现，自己深深迷恋的都市景观和速度，也和世界有着相似的时差：太空竞赛早在八十年代达到巅峰，而家乡的农民，却晚在我出生的那一年才开始集资建造“航天奇观”。长大一点，春游路过；再长大一点，奇观被废弃，等待地产商接手后，发现大家都路过。
我们应该用怎样的姿态回看过去，才得以不美化记忆，同时也不被乡愁吞噬？当我试图抽离自身视角，让一个比我小十岁，正就读于同一所中学的演员替代我检视那些时刻时，一切仿佛又被压缩成审美、景观、符号学。是否存在一种“重演”的路径，能够超越纯粹的审美机制？我们与世界的时差，又真的会结束吗？
