film stills © Shen Xin

Grounds of Coherence #1, but this is the language we met in

《天雨粟 #1，我们在这个语言中相遇》

16mm film and DV transferred to UHD, single channel video installation, 12:16, 2023

Protests in regional Mandarin, words for a story in Arabic, and a couple telling myth felt in English, three languages map their movements through relations. What is heard, and what is then given meaning in these connectedness of migratory and loving nature, is paired to forms, and transmitted through possible sounds.

but this is the language we met in is the first film in the series of films entitled Grounds of Coherence, which engages with ways of coming to knowing, and the ecosystems of languages, hence its Chinese title《天雨粟》: the sky rains grains, which was used to describe the creation of characters by Cangjie in 200BC, as recorded in Huainanzi. Grounds of Coherence as a series is a wish for continuity in aligning what becomes known and what is practiced, a mending and coming together of an understanding for art and life. Its first short film, but this is the language we met in, is where trees, teeth, and spoken words cross beyond the threshold of re-relating. Many elements in the film are of a learning process, of a word’s relation to language, a language’s expression to another, of wood in room returning to tree in soil, of teeth evoking bone memories — its 400 million year evolution from fish scales, of working together, and of a new story revealing itself. Instead of coming to terms with or tracing the complexity of a loss, the series proposes a different position in relation to the pain of losing. The forbidden speech in specific geographies prompted aspects of the work in finding ways to remember, so that what is spoken does not linger on the surface. The surface here can be experienced as an entropy of energy which reveals how forgetfulness is learnt and asserted, alike the protest in 2022 with people gathered in the name of the Uyghur people whose residential building caught fire under lock down policy. When answering the call for solidarity and empathy, one can very well be simultaneously embedded in the conditioning of wrong relations. Facing the limitation of understanding the pain of detachable others on alienated land, the work advocates for an in place knowledge — in one’s body, in one’s home, drawing up the first term of remembering that is connectedness.

I’m grateful for the following relations through which this work is made possible, thank you:

soil, plants, minerals, fungi, the four-legged, winged, finned and insectoid on the territories of

Wahpekute, Anishinabewaki, and Očeti Šakówiŋ, sensed and shared,

boundary waters of Anishinabewaki where the field recordings took place as part of AX archive,

the thermal energies of gathered bodies in 2022 witnessed and heard,

Ali Van’s performance, voices leading and following, her wisdom and love,

Yashaswini Raghunandan and Audio Academy’s tending to the sonic river bed,

Jason Moffat’s nurturing of colors from many places,

Amal Issa’s generosity with Arabic language,

Skyi Trazomsa’s passing of Tibetan sounds and knowledge,

Jennifer Hartjes’s patience with teeth and microphone,

Rajyashri Goody’s enunciation of Hindi,

Lazina Tayir’s enunciation of Uyghur,

Ayakoz Huan’s enunciation of Kazakh,

On cloud enunciation of Tatar and Turkish,

Shen Daohong’s company of journeys made.