2022. 50 minutes. Looped-Installation. Silent, Canada.
As a city dweller goes about her morning routine, transience, fluidity of economic change, gentrification, decay, and dislocated tensions that encompass the Victory Square today are dreamt upon seeing a stranger outside in the courtyard.
Habitus Fragments is a multifaceted three-part exploration on the architectural auras and embodiment of Vancouver’s Historic Chinatown through cinematic gesture and film-theatre aesthetics. Through a combined application of open documentation, empty shots, and hybrid synthesis of gesture, movement, projection, and interior-exterior space: the expanded cinema work aims to touch upon transience and fluidity of economic change, gentrification, decay, and dislocated tensions that encompass Vancouver’s Historic Chinatown (and it’s interconnected borders of Victory Square) today.
Credits:
Director/Camera/Edit/Sound – Beau Han Bridge
Cast: Jullianna Oke & Shervin Zarkalam.
Choreography – Rob Kitsos, Jullianna Oke, Shervin Zarkalam
Special Thanks – Corbin Salaken, SFU School for the Contemporary Arts, Ontario Arts Council.
As part of my MFA in Film production thesis work on Chinese-Canadian identity construction through film, I have arranged a research co-partnership between Toronto’s York University and SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts this summer in order to study the neighbourhood I was raised in during my early childhood (and late undergraduate years) and how it can be captured through interdisciplinary film practices. Being a fellow second-generation Chinese Canadian that has always associated this site-specific area as my “home”, the research experience has not only been a reflective homecoming in re-discovering who I am, but also an excitingly new experience of finding new forms (as Chekhov encouraged). Throughout this experience of working with Rob Kitsos (SFU Associate Director) and fellow SFU students Jullianna Oke (BFA in Dance) and Shervin Zarkalam (MFA), the learning and activities conducted in this short-term residency in the SCA’s corridors has once again given me new ways of looking, and new artistic approaches that has helped me delve into the complexities and nuances of reconstructing myself and my identity within these contemporary filmed spaces.
I would like to sincerely thank the wonderful help of SCA dance professor Rob Kitsos, SFU dance student Julianna Oke, and SFU MFA graduate candidate Shervin Zarkalam, whom have all given me (and continue to give) their exceptional guidance, wisdom, time, and support to my collaborative research activities. I would also like to thank the SCA for the generous support in permitting me to engage this inspiring fieldwork residency throughout the summer 2022 intersession semester.
