– Flights, Olga Tokarczuk
Drawing inspiration from the history and landscape of Ruifang, Taiwan, All That Water I Have (No) Words For embarks on an introspective journey to unravel Han-centric perspectives, superstition, and collective memories.
Several formats of research are being concluded throughout 2025. All phases and dimensions of the project serve as points of contact, followed by the elaboration and presentation as performance-installation in 2026.
Ruifang is a coastal region in northern Taiwan, shrouded in fog and winding through meandering landscapes. It became renowned for producing significant amounts of gold and coal from the late 19th to mid-20th century. This boom attracted a diverse range of populations and spurred aggressive industrialisation, which drastically transformed the region. It left deep scars—violence within the complex power structure and irreversible damage to the landscape and biosphere. The area was depicted in A City of Sadness, a Golden Lion Award-winning film by iconic Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien in 1989, which helped bring attention to its tragic past.
The intrusion of colonisers, clan conflicts, and frequent natural disasters or accidents plagued Ruifang until the late 1970s. Today, the abandoned mining sites are steeped in past tragedies and lingering tensions. Sometimes protective, sometimes divisive, the ghost stories of the region are shaped by who tells them and who listens. These stories convey both fear and comfort. This layered liminality—infused with toxins from the mining industries, the blood of victims, and the mourning of residents displaced by the long-gone gold rush—flows through its valleys and our bodies as we listen.
Amidst destruction, abandonment, and dreams, I am profoundly intrigued by the haunted history, landscape, and fantasies of an island that has been colonised, ruptured, and collectively amnesic. The mining industry exposed great cruelty in us and continues to shape our global reality. The transformation of both the land- and body-scape—on psychological and physical levels, individually and collectively—is deeply compelling. I am eager to create a series of projects to explore this geological sedimentation in the terrain and our bodies.
The work engages with the idea of "ghosts" not as supernatural entities, but as the traces and residues of past injustices, embedded within both the land and the body. By fusing oral histories, folklore, and movement, it explores how memory and trauma are passed down through generations and how the body becomes both a vessel and a site for these forgotten histories, much like how the mines were formed over millions of years. The project utilises field research, interviews, and interdisciplinary collaboration to engage deeply with the landscape, transforming it into a living archive through which the past can be re-imagined and re-experienced.
The goal is to disrupt centralised narratives, challenging how we remember and embody history through movement and storytelling. Through the integration of performance, sound, and ritual, this project seeks to activate spaces of collective reflection, creating a dialogue between past and present, presence and absence, and the seen and unseen.
In its broader scope, the project aims to offer a new way of thinking about how art and embodiment can act as vehicles for reconciliation and the reconstitution of collective memory, shedding light on histories that have been neglected or erased.
All That Water I Have (No) Words For is initiated by Berlin-based dance artist, facilitator, and researcher, TingAn Ying in 2025.
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