Journeys of Remembrance

Screening and conversation as part of Migration, Homecoming and Autoethnography: Shorts + in conversation at BLOC Cinema, Mile End, London.

The shorts programme was guest curated by Clare Chun-yu Liu, as part of Sine Screen's Whose Homeland season and included the video work of Erika Tan, Fiona Tan and Richard Fung.

Journeys of Remembrance uses photographs that Erika has taken in 1993 during a trip made by the her father, brother and herself to their ancestral village in Fujian Province, China. With the passing of time the authorship of these images has become obscured and their status as aide-memoir exposed for the subjectivity inherent in looking at, reading, and giving voice to the image. The image becomes yet another source of subjective interpretation and in this work is voiced through the narratives of 3 speakers, who are in fact performing the acts of reading and (re)interpreting- literally. The voice-overs have been produced from an interview between the 3 individuals who took the original journey, the interview then transcribed and read back with simultaneous translation into Hokkien, Spanish, Portuguese, English and Mandarin- or their approximate and often faltering equivalents.