Warmth, 2016

Basel 2016
Warmth

Bernier/Eliades

Video/Film
‘This film is based on a story I came across while researching the Beijing sound Museum. An expert on the art of keeping insects and birds told me the story of an ancestor of his who served a Qing Dynasty emperor. The emperor demanded to see butterflies in the winter, so this keeper of insects devised a contraption involving steam for the butterflies to fly in. My story takes place in present day Beijing. An elderly man visits an abandoned house every year to perform a secretive ceremony for himself alone – the ceremony of seeing butterflies fly in the winter. The work itself is about the concepts of freedom and ideology. This is something that we have to think about as artists in China. What is freedom and what can we do with it? The butterflies are given freedom but they can only fly within the warmth of the steam. When the fire runs out, the steam runs out, and they are forced back into captivity by their own volition. This is not a comment about China, but about us all. We all have our ideological constraints or comfort zones that we return to after the occasional leap into the abyss. Being in China only forces us to navigate these issues on a daily basis.’