Federica Zambeletti / KOOZ Hello Cyan, it's great to be here with you. The first film of the Ripple trilogy was screened at the first edition of SMAFF; it's nice when things come full circle. I wanted to start from the title of the project — ‘Ripple, Ripple, Rippling’, which holds a certain rhythm in its repetition; an idea of movement and reverberations outwards. Could we start by discussing what that ripple has come to represent, in the years since the project began?

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng Thank you; It's nice to be back to share this full circle moment of ‘Ripple, Ripple, Rippling’. We have this relationship, built over more than ten years, with Shigushan village on the outskirts of Wuhan; it was hard to find a title that could summarise our bond with them. We come to this image of thought, ripples rippling — like a pebble drops in water, and the spreading rings. That really speaks to the way we see the lives of rural migrant workers and how they make a living and their own worlds from marginalised conditions. It also speaks to our relationship with them: from a small start, it just keeps going and going and going.

KOOZ And what does it mean to bring that project to a close? Do you see this last episode as something which brings closure, or does it continue in a different direction?

JCC Yeah, we never know when a project ends, right? That's even harder than thinking about a title. In terms of the film trilogy, I would say this is the final chapter. Maybe that speaks to the structural relation between the three parts. The first film, ‘On the Margins’, describes one day in the village. It allows us to get to know the people, the place. The second film, ‘The Hall’, depicts one particular event in the abandoned People’s Commune Assembly Hall, where we screened our footage back to the villagers with whom we filmed, and they loved it. The third one, ‘Till Ashes Turn into Pines’, is really more of a feeling — about the inarticulacy of reincarnation. We were so embedded in the everyday moments of the village life, so I believe that we did feel some closure for ourselves — but our relationship with the village definitely continues and we go back there every year. Actually even as we speak, my collaborator Chen Zhen is on her way to the village. It’s not about a project or film anymore; it’s more like going back to see your grandma. It feels good.

KOOZ What's beautiful about this last episode is that the grannies are given the same level of importance as the nature of the pines. How did you learn to attune to these different communities, both human and non human? What techniques of listening did you have to develop to be able translate a particular mode of inhabitation?

JCC The first half of the question has quite a simple answer: just spend time with them. Over the last decade, we’ve stayed in the village each year. In particular, we went through the COVID pandemic altogether in the village; that really bonded us. It’s about time, attention and just being there with the villagers, that's the most important thing. When it comes to translation in terms of a cinematic language, it comes down to the relationship between image and sound, especially in this work. The entanglement of the grannies, their lives, and the pine woods builds to an intentional misalignment of image and sound in the work; in our experience of the village, sound always leads. You hear something first, and you may not see what's causing it. So in the film, the sound leads where the visual lags or perhaps never catches up: we love that sensory disjunction, and we hoped to push a bit further in the film through recoupling. When you see the grannies, you hear the pine woods; when you see the pines, you can hear the women. Their lives are so entangled that we see them as one within the other. So in the film, through the recoupling of sound and image, we're trying to push towards that transferred sensation.

KOOZ I’d like to discuss the project that you presented at the Kunsthalle in Bangkok, which also deals with sound as a mechanism of understanding and experience. Could you talk about your approach to sound and attuning to space, which links these two works?

JCC That's a really nice connection. For context: earlier this year at the Bangkok Kunsthalle, we presented a work called Hydroelectric Spectre, which is about the electricity that supports Bangkok; more broadly, it's about the transnational power grids across Southeast Asia. At the Kunsthalle, we took over the rooftop; from sunset to sunrise — for those twelve hours of darkness — we created an environment of collective attunement to the electricity, through a designed sound instrument that emits live sound generated directly from Bangkok’s electrical current, turning electricity into something that the visitors can play with. Visitors could enter into a tangible relation with electricity through play and sound.

On the rooftop, the pure sine wave was tuned to the space — that is, the column grids of the rooftop, creating a temporary space that you could only feel with your body. Its energy creates invisible points of high and low pressure; you have to move through it, using your body to feel. The connection between that work and the Ashes is about using your body as a sensing instrument, and also to challenge the dominance of the visual in culture, especially in the context of film. In this way — in trying to highlight a certain disadvantaged sense — we hoped to encourage curiosity, to open ourselves up sensations that might help us feel connected to matter, materials, other forms of life, and the massive infrastructures that support our lives.

KOOZ Linking it back to the choreography from Mengfan Wang, how did that collaboration enable you to understand how the body can itself become an instrument to sense space.

JCC Mengfan is a theatre director and choreographer. For me, the basis of the work and collaboration is still research driven. I would say that one of the strengths of research is about contextualizing things; it's about unpacking layers in order to foreground certain connections or contradictions. But with the body, we can go beyond the cultural context and language to forge a connection; if it’s done well, that bond becomes embodied. So it's all about forging connections, in a very physical way.

KOOZ Let’s connect that to the moment in which we find ourselves today — in loops of exhaustion from so much information, visual information. What are your priorities in terms of research or sensing methodologies and the kind of work that might help us to recalibrate, attuning ourselves to different ways of being in the world?

JCC That's an excellent question. We've been doing this field work for a really long time; our work in this particular village is one part of it, but another ongoing strand of work roughly follows the Mekong River across Southeast Asia. We follow the water and sands; in a way, we are trying to attune our senses to the river, to the landscape, to all of that more-than-human inhabitation, and that gives us new sensibilities. What we learned from the field, for example, includes what we might call a ‘hydroelectric sensibility’, in terms of the power-grid infrastructure that supports all our lives. But where and how can you perceive that power? We visited communities who actually live inside the hydroelectric dam; their lives float at fluctuating levels, according to the generation of and consumption of power. Once you understand those obscure and distant connections, you can never see electricity in the same way; I call this a hydroelectric sensibility. It's about developing these new sensibilities.

KOOZ Maybe that's a good moment to open up to any questions from the audience.

Giuseppe Di Salvatore Thank you very much for your film. I would like to ask about the use of the blank screen, which naturally allows us to focus on sound. At the same time, sounds recall images while the screen remains blank; the temporal continuity of sound causes us to create after-images. Was this blankness also a structural element of the film?

JCCAnother excellent question. It's very present for me. I'm the editor of Ashes, and my editing language is again really about rhythm: the rhythm of sounds, and attuning to that rhythm. The working principle for me is there should be no start, no end, only rhythm. The rhythm needed to be cyclical, which is what I learned from the village; that really is the heart of life there. That deep-seated, cyclical view of life also speaks to the multiple layers of temporality that you see in the film: from the commune history of the village to the grannies to the pine woods, all of that. The blank screen speaks to me about the coexistence of all these temporalities, all these life forms — at the same time highlighting the fragility in all of them. The base context is a lot of burning that takes place behind that blankness, linked to a tragic accident in the pine forest. That's why the chopping of the burnt pine trees is a continuous sound, coupled with the sound from the temple where the grannies are praying. These two sounds speak to me about that fragility but at the same time, about reincarnation. That's why I wanted no start and no end, just one process after another.

KOOZ As you mentioned burning pines, I was thinking about the presentations of your work at the Architectural Association, at Storefront NYC and the Bangkok Kunstalle; the sense of smell is missing from these, as one of the most primordial senses we have. Is that olfactory dimension something that you have considered?

JCC Yes! We often present this film in an installation format that we call spatial cinema, in which the film is really just one medium for us to achieve a spatial experience. Ideally you can actually enter into the projection and be with the grannies, inside the pine forest. We really did think about smell because in the pine forest, especially after burning, there's a very strong aroma. The grannies also spend a lot of time in temples, where incense creates another very strong smell. We haven’t achieved that dimension yet due to all sorts of building regulations, as you can imagine — but that's a great point.

KOOZ Cyan, thank you so much; it was wonderful to reflect on the trilogy and particularly on this last episode.

JCC Thank you.