(Dis)re-location (Dis)re-location

Featured: Qiyun Zheng

Synopsis:
(Dis)re-location is a video essay filmed in Amsterdam, where my Chinese friend, contortionist Qiyun Zheng, lives and works. Rejecting a melancholic diasporic discourse, the film reorients notions of homeland and migration through an ontological turn towards Ernst Bloch’s concept of the not-yet.

Structured into four short essayistic movements, the film moves from a reflection on infinite speed, via the becoming-multiple of the subject and the use of obsolete cameras as a metaphor for social-structural insufficiency, to a closing gesture towards a poetics of emancipation. Departing from Qiyun’s studio, the film traces processes of spatial segregation within the immediate urban surroundings while introducing dialogues from afar. Through these gestures, it extends from a fixed location to a re-location, ultimately opening, in its poetic ending, a productive negation – namely, (dis)re-location.

Zhenghang Fu is a doctoral researcher at the University of Porto, where he conducts visual artistic research situated between visual practice and critical theory. Working across photography, moving image, and writing, his research examines how documenting forms can be reconfigured to address questions of memory, history, and homeland. His work often engages with sites of abandonment, residual structures, and personal archives, treating them as spaces where personal and collective narratives intersect.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zhh_fo