Servitude: do not believe that Google Map
Three-channel Video, 4K, color with sound, 12'56''
Servitude: do not believe that Google Map is a speculative fiction inspired by an actual accident in 2021: an 18-year-old Siberian teenager froze to death after Google Maps set the navigation incorrectly. Unlike the local search engine Yandex, Google doesn’t account for road icing. Followed by the details in the news report, I started to compose a failed love story of a Siberian young woman, interrogating the legitimacy of the total embrace of digitalization, the unfair deployment within transnational corporations.
The archival images of Norilsk document its evolution from an indigenous habitat, through the Gulag era of Stalin’s regime, to its development as a nation-owned company-town, and ultimately to its portrayal as an urban shithole going viral on Reddit. As both China and Russia have embraced capitalism in their post-Communist stage, how do viewers embody this relationship of lover-wannabe as individuals to the state? Is there a love for the nation-state that failed to live through communism, and that is now living through the capitalist grandeur of the corporation and its global reach?
*Full video by request.
2020年12月，十八岁的 Sergei Ustinov 离开雅库茨克。他没有使用立足本土的 Yandex 导航，却选择相信谷歌地图的指引，走上一条臭名昭著的“死亡公路“，最后在冰天雪地的西伯利亚中失温而死。与他的目的地同为金属巨头Nonickel重要据点的诺里尔斯克，破冰船载着成吨的镍出发，沿着叶尼塞河来到鹿特丹、匹兹堡、上海，或是船只能停留的任意地方。
影片中的故事根据以上新闻改编，我试图想象居住在全球最北城市的少女，在城市拥有4G网络后学着伸出双手拥抱世界，顺着萌生的爱审视全球化的神话，最后试图逃离只为冶金业而存在的，农奴和政治犯们共同建立的城市——跨国企业的韬略布局若将城市或个人视为棋子，情欲是否能成为破局的那一着？
*完整视频请邮件索取。