Residual Light / Beneath the Floating Land 2022
The film is based on the daily landscape along the Chaotianmen Dock and riverbank in Chongqing, a city in Southwest China. The sight follows the lens as it wanders between the riverside and the navigation, and travels through different spaces and gatherings. At the same time, intertwined with these gazes at the landscape, the tourists and the locals, is a description of the landscape that spans time and space, narrated by a dialect voice-over, excerpted and adapted from the diary of a 19th- century British merchant-adventurer Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Little on their voyage through the Three Gorges into West China. Contemplating the relationship between the residues of history and modernities, the film traces an ambiguous zone that accommodates the complexity between history and reality through these fragmented landscapes and memories.
Dachen Bao is a visual artist, writer, and filmmaker based in Rotterdam and Chongqing, China.Through a practice of archival research, moving images and text Dachen Bao explores the complexity of local realities and the ever-shifting structural relationship with technologies, capital, geopolitics, history, and representation. His recent research is concerned with urban space, logistics,techno-infrastructures, and thought changes in Southwest China. He is a co-founder of self-organized Chongqing Work Institute (CWI), a research-based collective operating from 2018.