A Field of Non-Field, 2017

Basel 2019
A Field of Non-Field

Long March Space

Video/Film
Single-channel, Blu-ray disc, color and black-and-white, sound; 61’7”, continuous loop; edition of 6
Since financial capitalism and technology joined together to create the financial-technological capitalist system, new forms of administrative technology have developed with unprecedented power. This has made it possible for the ‘corporatocracy’ to manipulate contemporary society. In A Field of Non-Field, a woman describes in a voice-over how her brother has disappeared without a trace after escaping from a hospital where he had been confined several days after attempting suicide. She says, according to what her mother keeps telling her, ‘My brother just went somewhere far away, beyond the west.’ In a later part of the film, she says that her mother changes her response to ‘Your brother is just on his way back.’ In other sequences of the film, a group of actors perform the role of her brother and other people who are ‘traveling away’ and then ‘coming back.’ In Mādhyamaka Buddhist philosophy, through a narrative of neither going, nor returning, we can discover a possible crevice within what we originally considered to be an all-pervasive control technology, impossible to escape. This crevice can be transformed and re-transformed because no system is absolute or unbreakable.