A Tetralogy of Emancipation I [Day After Day After Mother's Day]

Audiovisual installation, in progress. [Preview / excerpt]

 

 

Borders of Self

About Joyce Ip’s video work A Tetralogy of Emancipation I-IV

Text by Anngjerd Rustand

 

It happens as I watch the first part (Day after day after Mother’s day) of Joyce Ip’s A Tetralogy of Emancipation: Some sort of seclusion. The conversation  (around the kitchen table, I imagine) may concern me, but I, the viewer, do not want to be part of it. I am absorbed in the video camera, moving it towards the ceiling, closing in on a lamp, and I play with the settings: dark, lighter, out of focus. Through the lens the lamp becomes a giant insect, and this affects me in a fundamentally different way than the conversation down here.

It’s Joyce’s family who are sitting there and talking; they’re speaking Chinese. The language and the fact that I don’t understand what they’re talking about, intensifies my interest in this other. Perhaps this leads me closer to her position. If I had been able to understand, I would have focused on the meaning of the words. She has withdrawn from the conversation and explores other possibilities within the room.

We are made aware that the conversation is about motherhood. That’s all. Joyce later tells me that she got pregnant shortly after shooting this sequence. And then she says to me that she wanted to be pregnant to explore what it is like. I haven’t heard it said like that before. But isn’t that what it’s all about, seeking a richness of experiences.

 

Emancipation, although this sounds like a paradox, can be seen as a sort of retreat. The process of becoming free demarcates the border between the self and the others. It is the freedom of withdrawal, and of looking at the past from a distance. It is growing up, becoming an adult. This act of emancipation you think you’ll be done with within a couple of years, until it dawns on you that it may well be a lifetime project.

Joyce talks about an emancipation of internal forces; of a surfacing of the subconcious. There is an ambiguity about both title and what the work expresses. The camera’s lens increases the distance between the individual and its surroundings. The images presented has been manipulated to acommodate a set of moods and ideas. In Typhon Trees we see silhouettes of trees in a storm, slowed down, and repeating, turning the violent movements into an endless immersive state. In the third sequence repetition is also essential: The surf breaking on a beach on a summer day is repeated only with small variations. The same bathing people, movements, laughter, over and over. It seems logical to imagine that the beach scene takes place before the typhoon. The sequence of the events becomes an important key. The altered chronology gives a hint of determinism, or of events being known beforehand. Does this mean emancipation is must be an illusion?

 

The last video in the tetralogy shows a human skeleton moving around in a dark room. It dances with its almost invisible, dark partner, slow and crawling, but still insistent. The trees in Typhoon Trees are dancing as well. Joyce refers to the editing of the storm as choreography. Choreography is somehow a more precise than direction and editing in all of the four pieces. It is a very basic urge: to search for the fantastic in the everyday, through bodily impulses. Let it out.