Solveig

Final few months of 2025 with ✧ Rhythms of the Energetic, my live video essay for @medialabmatadero pic-creds @alormya ✧ Deep under&overground Zhejiang tours with @infoandupdates ✧ Opera & saved letters. ✧ Mentoring in the slaughterhouse for Weird Futures Lab ✧ Overland, There’s Shorter Time to Dream, in convo w/ @sisyphusam @ica_nyushanghai ✧ Time looping with @blanca.pujals ✧ Figures and fathers, Lisbon. ✧ Fish-market morning and their kittens ✧ Home stays with a body insisting that I rest, the year ending in a cast. ˚˖𓍢ִ໋🦢˚

This Friday, tune in online as artist Solveig Qu Suess (@solveigsuess ) and Professor Weixian Pan (@hannahpan622 ) explore stories from the basins, hydroelectric imaginaries mediated by visual media, and the difficulties of representing environmental and developmental precarities across time and space. Bounded Time, Endless Becomings 📆 Friday, October 31 🕚 10:30am–12pm 🖥️ Online on Zoom 🎟️ Registration is required to receive the Zoom link for this virtual panel. Click the link in bio to register! This event is presented in conjunction with the exhibition 𝘋𝘸𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘜𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘚𝘶𝘯𝘴. Curated by Yantong Li (@simon_liyantong ), the exhibition grapples with the challenge of representing a planet in crisis, offering alternative strategies of apprehension that make the image-world of cataclysm more immediate and present. — 📸 Image: Installation view: Dwelling Under Distant Suns, curated by Yantong Li, September 4–December 20, 2025, Justin M. Barnicke Gallery. Photo: LF Documentation. — Read more about the panelists ⤵️

Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains (2025) @ the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery Part of the group show Dwelling Under Distant Suns, curated by @simon_liyantong open to the public until December 20th, 2025. Special thanks to Micah Donovan and Daniel Hunt, and @jaidyn_perry for supporting the realization of the space💕 📸 LF Documentation, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

Snaps from the workshop at @bangkok_kunsthalle where I shared prompts and strategies from my practice alongside excerpts from Little Grass and Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains. ✨ it felt super meaningful to draw together shared concerns, questions, and resonances across participants’ own processes— particularly in non-fiction storytelling, accessing without intruding, ethics of relationships, processes of remembering, staging the untranslatable, staying with difficult histories and with expanding cinema. Grateful to @rosalianamsaiengchuan for the invitation, and to all the participants who generously shared their beautiful projects.

I’m very glad to be part of Dwelling Under Distant Suns, curated by @simon_liyantong , opening tomorrow at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Hart House (University of Toronto), alongside Alvin Luong and Kent Chan. My contribution, Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains, is a two-channel installation set in Northern Thailand and Laos, where its rhythms are reshaped by distant hydroelectric and geopolitical infrastructures. The film moves between riverweed harvests, summits, and shifting tributaries to reflect on what it means to live with a river in flux. Through layered scenes of sensing, governance, and seasonal change, the film meditates on how the Mekong both sustains and resists capture, with its pulse continually negotiated, inhabited, and remade. Projected onto the gallery walls, the installation also interlaces the Mekong School’s thaibaan research and activism with my notes and archival documents from the Mekong River Commission and Thailand’s Electricity Generating Authority, bringing into friction how knowledge itself becomes a site of struggle. Heartfelt thanks to Simon for his in-depth engagement throughout this process. Grateful to @interactivemediaarts for their support; @_perila for the music score; @beichenzhangphoto @color.by.cody @_derrickwang and @arachacholitgul for their production collaboration; @narrtay for the editing assistance and to the Mekong School Library for generously sharing documentation of their conservation efforts and Thaibaan research methodology. Opening reception: Sept 3, 5–8pm. Exhibition runs until Dec 20, 2025, hope you can visit!

Feeling full after ending the summer in Thailand with @profmamamama and @hannahpan622 for our 🌊💦panel “Three Tales of Transboundary Rivers” amongst great company at the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference, followed by a chance to catch up with old friends by the Mekong River 🥲

▶️ WATCH NOW: “On Autoethnographic Filmmaking” With Solveig Qu Suess @solveigsuess Co-hosted with Brand-New-Life @brand_new_life_magazine ➡️ On Futuress.org! (Link in bio) This tutorial elaborates on filmic tools and techniques which explore the autoethnographic as a documentary art form. Solveig Qu Suess points to various documentaries which focus on mother-daughter relationships, transnational feminist histories, and missing women in resistance movements. She explores excerpts from her ongoing documentary work, Little Grass, to guide reflections on optics and positionality. “How do you write or rewrite histories according to different subject positions? And, especially with hybrid identities, how do you narrate certain really confusing and contradictory things? […] The absence of information [was] driving the work and also weaving together alternative ways of thinking about history, thinking about time, and optical development, but through the mother-daughter relationship. [...] It felt really important to keep questioning my intention, the limits of the archive, the failures of the archive, and never really being able to find the full picture of anything.” 🌟Hungry for more? Check out our upcoming series “Printing Futures, Publishing Resistance” discussing the politics of translating, archiving, and publishing! (More info in the comments below and via our bio!) 💌 Do you like our events? To sustain Futuress in the long run, we need 600 people to support Futuress with 10 CHF/month. Every little bit helps, so please consider donating today! (Link in bio) #filmmaking #autoethnography #documentary #research #storytelling #history #tutorial

🌐 La cineasta e investigadora 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗲𝗶𝗴 𝗤𝘂 𝗦𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘀 (@solveigsuess ) se une a #Medialab como mentora del LAB 4 Futuros Raros, del que es comisario Bani Brusadin (@nonsensebani ).⁣ ⁣⁣ Explora cómo los sistemas a gran escala dejan su huella en terrenos íntimos. En su trabajo más reciente investiga la reprogramación de los ritmos de un río por demandas energéticas en territorios lejanos, así como las ausencias que envuelven el trabajo de su madre en el desarrollo de sistemas ópticos en la China de los años 80.⁣ ⁣⁣ 🔗 En nuestra página web podéis encontrar un texto en el que describe su enfoque hacia la creación de imágenes en una época de profundos desalineamientos.⁣ ⁣⁣ 💭 Además, está disponible el webinar en el que Solveig describe las numerosas conexiones posibles entre su investigación y los temas que a explorar en el LAB 4.

Excited to share that I’ll be at Bangkok Kunsthalle next Saturday, July 12 for an afternoon and evening of film + conversation. ⠀ 14:00–17:00 Post-Documentary Workshop For filmmakers & artists working in/around documentary — we’ll dive into representing the intangible: slow violence, infrastructural entanglements, and the architectures of power. I’ll share parts of my practice and we’ll open the space for collective discussion. Bring your works-in-progress. ✹ Still accepting applications — thank you to those who’ve already sent in strong ones! To apply: send a short project description + 2 footnotes (references/inspirations) to [email protected] ⠀ 19:00 Screening: Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains A two-channel film tracing the shifting rhythms of the Mekong across Northern Thailand and Laos. Followed by a conversation with @rosalianamsaiengchuan ⠀ Both events are free & open to the public. Workshop spots are limited. Grateful to @purpletree.co for hosting me in residence, and to @rosalianamsaiengchuan for the generous invitation!

Join us May 8th for an evening of film, art, and urgent questions about our future. Berlin-based, Taiwanese artist and filmmaker Su Yu Hsin presents a curated screening of short films by international artists that explore climate change, water systems, and the deep entanglements among ecology, digital infrastructure, and colonial histories. Future Flows: Screening + Artist Talk 📆Wednesday, May 8 ⏰ 6:30–8:30 PM 📍 MarinMOCA, San Rafael These works don’t just document crises, they imagine new currents of resistance, connection, and care. Featuring films by: @vwedemeyer @sonia__levy @gago_gagoshidze @solveigsuess @asiabazdyrieva @ange_goh @rcagnes Presented in conjunction with “Future Flows”

Had the great pleasure to join the third route of Expeditionary Botanics, a collective research trip that focused on Borders, Institutions and Tropical Crops, organized by @daixiyun , @chengxinhaodeab with the Kunming Contemporary Art Museum. 🌿🪲🔦 Yingjiang - Yongchang Road - Diafennah / Lancang River - Southern section of the ancient Taoyuan Road

Floods and their Feedback Loops 1. The difficulties of making a convincing floodscape; learning from Jaidyn Perry at NYU Shanghai. 2. Last year’s flooding between August and September hit Northern Thailand hard, including much of Chiangkhong. Further downstream, instead of leaving, residents along the Ing River rushed out with fishing gears in anticipation of all the fish it carried. I followed PhiChak to their new gardens which were flourishing along Chiangkhong’s riverbanks, enriched by nutrient-rich sediment carried downstream—sediment that upstream dams would have otherwise trapped but that the flood seeped and carried through. 3. Maps on Meandering Rivers, US Army Corps of Engineers and their maps of the Mekong. 4. Desires to control; Bhumibol Dam, the first multipurpose dam in Thailand (1964). 5. The widow of Wiang Nong Lom village. After a feast consuming a giant albino eel, the entire village was cursed by a great flood. A widow was left as the sole survivor, forbidden from eating the eel due to its white color. 6. Waiting for the sunrise over a flood of clouds, Phu Chi Fa, Thailand/Laos.