Ripple, Ripple, Rippling

Knowledge in the marginal everyday calls out an inherent flaw in dominant ways of thinking and acting—the modern Enlightenment mind—based on a world system of stability and certainty. The traumatic loss of coordinates in the planetary crises of this era, the climate crisis in particular, is challenging this context to its very core. The ground is melting, literally. The melting down of established frames of thinking, mind, and knowledge needs to catch up. 

With the middle generation missing from more than 80 percent of contemporary rural families in China, “Floating”, “Dissolving” and “Rippling” are ways in which these families form networks of care and support systems beyond the nuclear family structure, hinging on intergenerational and cross-household dependency. Tremendous knowledge lies in capturing latency, temperament, and dispositions to appropriate frictions, cracks, and leaks between dominant forces, agents, and systems. Here precarity becomes potentiality. However, dispersed and circulated as part of daily life in the margin, the knowledge is overlooked and diminished by the dominant culture and the paternalistic model of experts’ leadership. 

The project pursues a double prototype: On the one hand, to bring out the knowledge that speaks to the much-needed reorientation in the turbulent time and space of planetary crises; and on the other, to devise an experimental, collaborative method that is able to recognize, articulate, and communicate such knowledge. At the intersection of anthropology, architecture, performance, and filmmaking, the project seeks to sensitively and rigorously ground alternative imaginaries in the specificities of lived experiences. 

Ripple, Ripple, Rippling proposes a documentary-fiction filmmaking project in collaboration with villagers in Shigushan, Wuhan. Central to the method is to create conditions in which villagers can become active agents of cocreation, forging a collective enunciation. The film is envisioned as, simultaneously, ethnographic documentation; a hosting device of villagers’ own performative expressions, storytelling, and imaginaries; and an Acted Manifesto through collective happenings in situ. Villagers are to act out projective and emergent improvisation informed by the dance theater exercises in selected and modified spatial settings. Seeking to invoke experimental openings in which nondiscursive bodily knowledge can be projected, the filmmaking process is thus intended to penetrate reality as well as knowledge production.