Afternoon Hearsay

2025, 18:50, three-channel video installation, 5.1 surround sound

super 8, 16mm and 35mm transferred into digital

8.75mm film - a celluloid format unique to China and never circulated elsewhere, was a film format where no camera was made for. This print film stock was primarily used for mobile projection.

'What is a film without a camera?’, a question that emerged from the research, was explored by the artist through camera-less filmmaking techniques such as photograming 8.75 archival prints onto 16mm and 35mm color negative print stock. Through DIY printing and photochemical processing, images of film strips burn, blur, and tear within the chromatic space. The fleeting frames of archival films overlap with the super 8 camera footage shot by the artist. These interlayered images coalesce with fragments of optical sound and narratives from unnamed interlocutors, weaving together fragmented stories of an audience, a film factory and a camera inventor, where facts are immaterial, and memories are evanescent. Together these images create a hypnotising, intimate and poetic space for illusive and open-ended narratives to unfold. Much is obscured, withheld or left unsaid. Gaps in certainty and lapses in coherence are filled with the sensorial materiality of film.

Here, the images and sounds of resistance are folded into the tales of the cinematic invention. Reimagining a format that once resisted circulation, as a medium through which other forms of resilience emerge — where its associated affect and dissenting hearsay continue to ripple, forming a site of memory that resists erasure.

Co-commissioned by The Common Guild, Rockbund Art Museum, Centro Pecci and Lo schermo dell'arte