Masterthesis, Zurich University of the Arts
The thesis can be read as a curatorial endeavor. A speculative attempt to conduct an interdisciplinary curatorial research in the fields of post-colonial theory, theology, anthropology, history, visual and cultural studies. By employing the method of a visual essay, it constalated various cosmologies, portraying their intricate interplay fraught with friction. It created a work where connections emerged and tools to subvert the regime of the gaze were tested. Focusing on Anito, an ambient ancestral spirit from around the island of Pongso No Tao in Taiwan, the work positioned minor deities and ancestor spirits within the predicament of Christianity and the paradoxes of modernity. I drew on Anito – who hovers between malevolence and friendliness, the dead and the living, a mediating figure between the worlds – to investigate how one can narrate something from the perspective of a liminal entity, and if one can write against artificial boundary demarcations without reproducing them. By tapping into concepts of media, hauntology (Derrida, Gordon) and “crisis of presence” (De Martino) the work reflected how ritual practices and ghosts as (non-representational) metaphors un/settle time and space and mediate the struggle for life. It shed light on so-called paradoxes of modernity and laid out how modes of resistance at sites of extraction, colonial expansion, political ideology and the so-called markers of modernity (progress, development, modernization, industrialization, urbanization) may unfold. Ultimately the work positioned narrative-building, border-keeping logics and their tipping points and fault lines as an ultimate disjointedness of ontology, history, inheritance, materiality, and ideology at heart of curatorial practice.
Mentored by: Anselm Franke and Ana Teixeira Pinto