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Life of the Pilgrim

The first-generation congregation needs to resist secularized tendency.Though, they don’t wish to be isolated from the rest of the people,because that’s not God’s will.There is always a voice calling on them:“to be among them…”

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客旅生活

绘一个生态系，故事必然跨越多个世代，涉及不同物种，这也反映在李然讲述的方法上。作品的图像运用50年代新疆建设兵团畜养棉羊的科学记录档案。旁白的口吻则模仿自然科学电视节目，描绘三个世代的羔羊（新教徒）迁徙新疆，面对本地少数民族的宗教与生活历程。李然借由作品台词形容，这是一则“属世的困惑”。在新疆的开垦史背后，他从具体的基督教文本中阅读、反思基督教信仰内在的拓殖历史。横跨三代的宗教思想沿革叙述即便是线性的，却涉及多维的议题。二元

Selected Media Platforms for Contemporary Indigenous Knowledge and Arts

Uncontainable Natures,” features three scholars who have long been focused on Southeast Asian contemporary art: Kevin Chua, Lucy Davis, and Nora Annesley Taylor. The two-issue special edition (Issues <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/2bvyymjxtlm9si3/ANTENNAE%20ISSUE%2054.pdf?dl=1" target="_blank" class="en">54</a> and <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/ar2hr9nmglpvshw/ANTENNAE%20ISSUE%2055.pdf?dl=1" target="_blank" class="en">55</a>) contains a total of 32

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YWY, the forward leaping to the past and the countless futures to be found

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Project Portal Series: Live Talk with Akac Orat at His Traditional Loma House

Christianity. It concerns the ways in which dualistic monotheism interact with indigenous animistic belief, and with the localized forms of worship that developed within Protestantism. Spanning three generations of religious ideas, the narrative does not bound by its linear and epic nature, it forces us to witness other dimensions beyond the settlers and the natives: changing landforms, re-organized crops, the process of domestication, and so on.

<div data-block-type="iframe" class="en"><iframe src="https://player.bilibili.com/player.html?aid=293455585&amp;bvid=BV1uf4y177Qg&amp;cid=421676839&amp;page=1&amp;high_quality=1&amp;danmaku=0" scrolling="no" border="0" frameborder="no" framespacing="0" allowfullscreen="true" width="75%" height="560"> </iframe><figcaption>Li Ran, Life of the Pilgrim, 2017, HD single-channel color film, sound, 33’. Courtesy the artist and ShanghART Gallery</figcaption></div>

In this semi-fictional essay film, the sources are taken from the records of Xinjiang Construction Corps’ production practices at the May Day Pasture from 1954 to 1964, as well as news photography and performance documentations from 1950s to 1980s. In the film, the three generations of sheep are analogies of the migratory (colonial) life of Christians, in which the separate dreams between generations bespoken numerous contradictions. I speak both the outsider’s and the insider’s perspective when narrating the story, provoking the contextual crack between the Christians and the world around them.

The Deep of Folk Knowledge: On Mouthless Part I by Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė

In the opening scene of Mouthless Part I (2020), the performers sit or recline, reading on their phones. It feels like a queered version of the ordinary activities of Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė’s Young Girl Reading Group, which holds weekly gatherings centered on feminist-inspired theory and fiction or writings about cybernetics and nature. The main narrative of the film is almost entirely comprised of extensive quotations borrowed from their reading group, such that it is somewhat reminiscent of experimental novels made up of footnotes. At times, the camera pans to the performers’ vampire make-up, which brings to mind Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, a popular book among theory enthusiasts. Yes, reading Adam Mickiewicz’s poetic drama Dziady in unison has the feeling of a religious ritual, but queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theoretical reflection on paranoid reading is similarly hypnotic. Next, they read fantastical texts about forests and trees. Their conjuring spells employ fragments of Donna Haraway’s writing about technologically enhanced primate vision. Here, the film cuts between various micro-organisms in a flow of shape-morphing post-production effects. In this series of indoor reading scenes, these cryptic performances consist of “reading, conjuring and haunting,” thereby bringing reading and ritual incantations infinitely closer to one another. While their grotesque style of reading responds to the upswell in theory now happening in contemporary art, another aspect of Gawęda and Kulbokaitė’s twists on these feminist texts lies in the juxtaposition of elements such as Silvia Federici’s surveys of witch hunts as early capital accumulation and Eastern European folklore in which witchcraft persists.

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Ciwas Tahos, Perhaps She Comes from/to__Alang, Two-channel video installation, HD, 11’31”, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

In this instance, the indigenous film collective’s practice and the indigenous knowledge of Bamayak and Mabaluk prompted Povinelli to trace her own folk knowledge to Carisolo and its connection to religious wars. Here, the profound connection that lies beyond a superficial coincidence in the folk narratives of the Temahahoi an

arxism, which is largely devoid of a feminist aspect. In contrast, one of the motivations for Part I is a potential connection between European witches and ecological (indigenous) knowledge. One of the characters in Mouthless, Ghost 2, is a historical figure named Barbli Bodmer of Wattenwyl that they found in the Fribourg Archives. We later discover that a reading of the original archival documents in the film (19’56”-23’56”) describes Bodmer admitting to fornication with the Devil in the forest and causing illness in humans and animals. The words are paired with images of an ever-changing, shape-shifting primeval forest, which gives the impression that some indistinct object is haunting the landscape in the AI-generated shadows. If we are to temporarily give the parlor game in Part I a name, i

Editor’s Introduction

The title of this issue “Spring Mud Metabolism” was extracted from the most famous passage in reformer Kung Tzu-chen’s writing on the “returning to seclusion” (guiyin) genre in classical Chinese literature. While his apocalyptic poetry series certainly prefigured the subsequent transformation of China, in the above quote, the scholar-official transvalued his career disappointment (fallen flowers) into an aspirational facilitator of an enriched educational environment (spring mud). It is the metabolic aspect beyond the material (flowers) and the spiritual (not heartless) that this issue of COMPOST would like to further investigate through the four contributions introduced below.

民俗知识的深度空间：评Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė《无嘴一》

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林安琪（Ciwas Tahos），《她可能來至＿社》，双频装置录像，11’31”，2020

民俗知识（FK）的讨论近来越发成为人类世年代下的批判性思维之重要启发。在定居殖民主义国家的学术圈中，同样的主题则往往被称作原民知识（IK）。在民俗知识与原民知识的缝隙中，我想进一步将Gawęda与Kulbokaitė的实践看作是超越移住民/原住民二分法的一个特例。先来看看一个与之平行的案例，同样是民俗知识遭遇原民知识的时刻：卡拉宾电影小组成员之间的对话，澳大利亚的原住民成员Rex Edmunds谈到他如何捡起祖先知识，而作为回应，Elizabeth A. Povinelli则提起她追寻自己的欧洲祖先在意北卡里索洛（Carisolo）的部落：

In the opening scene of Mouthless Part I (2020), the performers sit or recline, reading on their phones. It feels like a queered version of the ordinary activities of Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė’s Young Girl Reading Group, which holds weekly gatherings

Dreams are like this:just as you arrive at the climax of the story,where you start to peruse the symbolic meaning of these images,you’d wake up suddenly,leaving you a fragmented image in mind.As the gentle morning light shines to announce the arrival of day,this memory gradually fades away.

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Reminiscent of Aldo Leopold’s reconsideration of the “Abrahamic concept of land”, Li Ran’s video essay Life of the Pilgrim considers the analytical structure of colonial expansionism by contemplating the Christianity. The narrative also concerns the ecological changes taking place where migrants and indigenous peoples meet. As the essay depicts an ecosystem, Li Ran’s narrative spans multiple generations and involves multi-species. The still images come from scientific records and archives from the Xinjiang Construction Corps in the 1950s related to sheep farming. The tone of the narrator imitates that of nature programs, depicting three generations of sheep (symbolizing Christians) migrating to Xinjiang and their interactions with the religions and lives of the natives. In the film, Li Ran describes this as a “worldly confusion.” Against the backdrop of historical trail-blaze in Xinjiang, he reads from actual biblical sources and reflects on the expansionist colonial history inherent in Christianity. It concerns the ways in which dualistic monotheism interact with indigenous animistic belief, and with the localized forms of worship that developed within Protestantism. Spanning three generations of religious ideas, the narrative does not bound by its linear and epic nature, it forces us to witness other dimensions beyond the settlers and the natives: changing landforms, re-organized crops, the process of domestication, and so on.

28’50”What is man that You are mindful of him? Psalm 8:4 There is still an apparent seam between metaphor and personification,this is obviously not an alternative relationship on a historiographical sense,I thought, are there other possible ways of telling the story?For example, grinding up all romanticized rhetoric,or eliminating all nostalgia and the infinite narrationAnd restoring it to a case in history?&nbsp;This story does not have a narrative.There is a group of the construction militants of Xinjiang in 1954,who labored and interned for a decade at the May Day Pasture.There is no mention of them reclaiming the land, building tents, grazing animals, husbandry, artificial breeding, consolidating data, recording, group photographs.Besides being nostalgic, the process of dehairing, flaying, chopping, deboning, and freezing, cycled endlesslyuntil they stepped on the horse carriage to return to the city in 1964whereby to wait for the next movement that will fundamentally reform them.These fuzzy things you seeare none other than a group of useless animals on the sunset grassland.When you are alive, there is always the perfect reference of skin and flesh placed there.Thereon, they eat together, sleep together, fornicate togetherand excreting together,be hunted together, and be slaughtered together.

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The internal management of the church became increasingly excessive,in spite of the dispersion of this generation.Separatists appeared among moderate Evangelists.they are keen on judging people’s strength and weaknesses with theological teachings,especially for those thriving Charismatic congregations,or even labeled them as “heresy”.Certain leaders in the Charismatic movement became increasingly radical,prosperity theology and radical mysticism corroded the church frequented by mostly young people,they also spared no effort in blaming certain Evangelicals as the “poisonous type”,the Pharisees of “Legalism”!

Naturalism and scientific supremacy have established a steady power of discourse in the upbringing of this generation.

In the early spring, katman mattocks and iron shovels broken into the frozen earth.The Siberian cold front was relentless to the desolate plateau and desert here.The rolling Bogell Peak capped with snow can’t be seen from here.

“we can make friends with other living things.”

how do we develop a posthumous conscientiousness in which composting becomes the modus operandi of media platforms, refashioning the idea of the new?

Perhaps Arrow Factory in 2008 could be considered the fruit that grew from composting underground art from the 1990s.

I wondered if, rather than commissioning authors to write fresh contributions for this new media platform, we should consider something geared toward “old” media, so that we can explore the possibilities of composting with existing materials.

In his curatorial practice, Akac Orat presents his thoughts on the indigenous ontology of “becoming a&nbsp;real human being.” Compared to an essentialized understanding of indigenous knowledge and identity, this bodily knowledge must be activated in the contemporary moment.

Legal scholar Brenna Bhandar has examined how identities were created for North American indigenous people as a result of land and property rights. These identities were shaped by modern property rights systems, forming what she calls the <a href="https://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvDGZxk1djY" target="_blank" class="en">“identity-property nexus.”</a> Bhandar proposed this idea with the need to “develop a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.”

This non-fiction text shows us that, perhaps when reading the Karrabing Film Collective’s of settler colonialist critique, one can make use of the museums where you live and the memories of one’s ancestors to imagine yourself relative to the Karrabing Film Collective.

Can we simply compare our understanding of indigenous people with China’s conception of ethnic minorities? Or, in the indigenous land of China, can we understand settler colonial critique as a manifestation of post-colonial discourse?

#1 Compostellation

Life of the Pilgrim