蜘蛛三则
three spider things
single-channel video, 2022
I collected these footages from the summer of 2020, when I moved from Middletown, CT to Chicago and stayed in my partner’s apartment in downtown, to the summer of 2021, when I moved to my own apartment in Hyde Park. Many things were happening at that time: moving, pandemic, protests against police violence, presidential elections, etc. I recorded some of the events with my phone, which I did not know how to make sense of or deal with at that time. The making of this video gave me the opportunity to revisit these memories after a period of time. I chose to rethink these events through the lens of spiders, because they were closest to me (physically) during the epidemic: we lived in the same space, without masks, we experienced the same weather, and we felt the same “vibration.” At the same time, they only remained at the periphery of my life -- outside the window, in the corner, only appearing during the evenings. If editing the old footages came with a temporal deferring, thinking through the life of spiders brought a spatial distance/difference (from the center of my experience). The combination of the two created a différance, echoing the différance (i.e., the indeterminacy or indefinability) of the events that occurred in my life.
Like spiders capturing vibrations through the bridges, I also tried to be sensitive to and even attest to the vibration that trembled my/our lives. However, as Maurice Blanchot writes in The Writings of the Disaster (1980), “When the disaster comes upon us, it does not come. The disaster is its imminence, but since the future, as we conceive of it in the order of lived time belongs to the disaster, the disaster has always already withdrawn or dissuaded it; there is no future for the disaster, just as there is no time or space for its accomplishment” (Blanchot, 1-2). The disaster cannot be determined. It is unfinished and always coming. Therefore, my writings, video, or my witness can never be completed. They all remain open, calling me and waiting for my responses. Hence, to take responsi-bility in the assemblage of lives is to keep responding to these vibrations, to wait, patiently, in the time and space that has withdrawn yet keeps coming back.