Work
a) Single-channel video, Full HD (Documentation of an one-hour workshop)
b) 05’38’’
c) 2019
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Keep It Clean, 2020, still images from the Full HD video
Silently and steadily dirt covers our living space. Cohering to various outlines of
surfaces, substances and volumes, the tiny but discernible physical properties
of dust pile up evenly and continually. When humans repeatedly clean
our environment, we keep on updating cleaning supplies (preferably to be
timesaving, effort-saving, and effective), and transfer the dust from a domestic
to a natural environment. This human labour is based not only on the notions
of hygiene, but on mechanisms or the exercise of power toward natural
conditions, where homogenisation, governance, and control are employed.
At the beginning of the workshop, Keep It Clean, participants
sit on the ground, boiling their own natural cleaning solutions, collectively, and
then purifying the gallery space with exaggerated, unconventional sizes of
cleaning tools, such as brooms/brushes with long handles, rolls of rugs, gloves
with expansive sleeves, bars of soap. By matching up the outlines, materials
and functions of cleaning supplies − as if dust is always shaped by space,
our new ways of reactions and body movements loosely change from subject
to object.
Ultimately, the perfectly ‘clean status’ is proclaimed between the participants,
objects, and space, on which the concept of the workshop is largely based
- both demonstrating the power and effectiveness of humans’ control in an
absurd way. Here, will ‘the complex compounds’ (which are reproduced
between the participants, objects, and spaces) to some extent ‘return’ to
nature? Or to possibly reenter the same/another space? Or, the remnants are
staying (with nowhere else to go), and awaiting the next clean?
CREDIT
Director/Producer: Jacky Jaan-Yuan Kuo; Participant: Montserrat Mariana Llampallas, Jinbin Chen TianYi, Shuk Pui Yu Bobby; Director of Photography: Rickard Ravnanger Aall; Editing/Additional Camera: Jacky Jaan-Yuan Kuo


Keep It Clean, the ‘display’ and the behind-the-scene arranged by the participants, 2019



Left: Jinbin Chen TianYi (CH); middle: Shuk Pui Yu Bobby (HK); right: Montserrat Mariana Llampallas (MX).





