Liu
- 2023
- performance lecture
- In the performance lecture. I gathered four bilingual speakers. Without hearing each other, my participants listened to my narrations through the headphones on them. I read the scripts based on my collection in their original languages(mostly Chinese); my participants translated what they heard into English at the same time. Through the process of receiving, interpreting, and re-narrating, memories are reformed into various shapes.
- I use language to solidify these fragments of regret. However, I doubt whether such an emotion, a psychological effect, can truly be restored by words. In my collection, there are also some objects under the theme such as a colored teardrop. Steiner was deeply touched by it; she believed it was poetic and emotional. However, what I did not say was that this single tear was squeezed out of my sheer will for the purpose of this archive. It is difficult to measure how much of the imagined and projected emotion is in this sample. Similarly, I wonder if the regrets shared by the narrators are natural crystallizations of their complicated memories; how much of it is artificially synthesized to display or perform.