Being a pair of eyes, I rarely look back at the thousands of frames l‘ve captured for @plain_district , nor do I ever post them.
Yet, through years of presence across multiple cities and underground clubs, this subtle journey has uncovered a pale fire I never expected to find in my practice.
Delighted to finally share a selection from that voyage🔮✨
We Plant Strange Forests 🌱
WORM invites you to a multimedia exploration of urban life, intimacy, and alienation. Four Master’s students from
@lensbased.pietzwart will present works reflecting on how humans relate to the environments we’ve built over generations.
How intimate do you feel with your city? Is your house truly a home? Do you feel more at home online or offline?
This exhibition brings together photography, videography, and an independent zine, A Tool For People To See, inviting visitors to slow down and reimagine urban spaces beyond productivity.
Featured Artists:
🌱Maria Napiórkowska (@przytulniee ). Maria’s work blends play and observation, using publications and paper-based forms.
🌱Liu Siyan (@s_siyan.l ). Liu creates still and moving images that trace the fragile connections between human presence and the vast cosmos.
🌱Yuan Yuan (@eamesarthur ). Yuan’s practice spans writing, moving images, and photography, exploring queerness, marginalization, and anti-anthropocentric narratives.
🌱Elli Lymperopoulou (@mountaintriptych ). Elli explores the intersection of body, time, and nature through video performance.
15 January: 15:00–20:00 OPENING
16 January: 15:00–20:00
17 January: 15:00–20:00
WORM Rotterdam
worm.org
Cici Wu with Yuan Yuan / Belonging and Difference
Dongcheng, Beijing; Chinatown, New York; Hung Hom, Hong Kong; Parque Ibirapuera, São Paulo
At the heart of this work, the artists explore how the notions of “diasporic” and “migratory” are indexed, suggesting the potential of migratory aesthetics rather than territorial defense as an experimental means of repair – continuously narrating, expressing, liberating, and awakening. They search along manifold routes and pathways for ways to negotiate identity not through geography or nationality, but rather through flexible networks of social belonging and political alignment. The memories of the isolation caused by transit and travel between Beijing, Hong Kong, and New York in 2022 and 2023 linger. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes behind. The world of life and the world of film occupy the same temporal flow, and as spectators – caught between horizons, blurred images, and unexpected breaks – we move between belonging and difference. “Belonging and difference” is, in fact, the dimension that fundamentally shapes Cici and Yuan’s video work. But while the idea of belonging might suggest a sense of group or community unity, here it is much more closely linked to difference – as a productive force and a constant movement of transformation. Identity escapes this equation. An alternative notion of identity is put to the test: porous and circulating, discontinuous and errant.
Text by André Pitol
Download the WAVA app and go find the work on site! Link in bio
Part of Apparitions, the 36th Bienal de São Paulo with WAVA
It's a memory flashback from 50 days ago. Entered the mountains at a time that felt unreasonable, and perhaps as a result, I encountered no humans behaving "reasonably" either. Instead, I observed traces of extensive human intervention — ski resorts, high-speed highways, power grids, cable systems, elevated bridges — all forms of infrastructural conquest that, over time, seemed to have been absorbed back into the mountain’s embrace. As I moved through the mountains in this small human body, the human’s trace rising higher than the surrounding peaks appeared more miraculous than nature itself. But I feel so disturbed to see this.
One night, crossing the national border in darkness under a rising full moon, this little human body in a car, moved rapidly through successive ranges on the highway. Bridges, ski resorts, cable cars, power grids, residential zones carved into the slopes … all quietly folded into the dusky embrace of the mountains. The edge of conquest felt strangely gentle, ambiguous. The mountains had given way to every human need for dwelling.
At the horizon, mountains, endless. The sky in the distance held onto a faint trace of light. Closer in, the valleys and ridgelines were swallowed by shadow, only scattered glimmers from human homes tucked in between.
At night, the mountains wrap people in silence with darkness, and the sense of having no place of origin, no clear destination, deepens. It isn't only a question of belonging to this civilization, it is also a wonder whether I even belong to the human species, or even to this planet at all.
Lately, much of my current identity query unfolds around a crisis of anthropocentrism, yet all these questions eventually turn inward, toward this consciousness moving through these spaces in a small body, inside a small vehicle:
Who is this “I”? And what is it?
What is it creating, destroying, reflecting?
Why is it so small, yet so full of miracles?
🔶Why does it have to be a photo book?
Join us this Wednesday for our film programme and exhibition: "And A Second Later" at @worm_rotterdam , where you can explore the answers by flipping through these handmade photo books and zines—created by our first-year Lens-Based Media artists!
1-2
“Artificial Dreams” @eamesarthur
3-4
“G A P S” @enrico_piffer
5-10
“Behind the Curtain Inside that Cave is a Black Mirror Trying to See What’s on the Dark Side of the Moon”
“Cover / Surface”
“Untitled Cam” by Wenxuan Xu
💗🔷
Wednesday, 25th of June / 17:00-18:30
Glimpses from my new short film Flames Everywhere.
Inspired by old dreams, a vivid preface to a fresh exploration of identity, sense of belonging, and deeper nature of being through transformation of landscape, time, and memories.
Special thanks to the sound and music designer, wonderful @iamdustmite ✨
Come and experience it at @eye_film , 8th Feb, ResearchLab 2025 🫧
有一种不知该如何诉说的链接奇妙发生在了不止一地一时，又不止一世。除了看到感到印证到爱的痕迹如此确凿真实又流动着之外，在新月与新月之间，命中注定像信仰一样知无不言，抚摸着灵魂深处。
It is happening, without language, without a story. It is happening, everywhere, all the time
beyond this life, transcending others— the bond, forming, mysteriously.
Besides seeing, feeling, and finding the traces of love—
so solid, so real, yet endlessly flowing— between each new moon and the next
undeniable fate, like faith itself
knowing all, speaking all
touching the deepest parts of the soul.
