(s)no(w)borders was originally a sound creation based on words collected between China and Belgium in 2006 on the theme of snow. This creation is being revisited today and will be accompanied by short silent films that were shot on film. —- in memory of Huang Xiaopeng.
Seemingly simple questions give rise to much more complex reflections on what lies behind a snowflake or its disappearance. Have you ever seen snow? Does snow erase borders? How do we live with it? Without it? What do we imagine about what we don’t know? What do we retrain from that which is disappearing?
It is in the intimacy of our relationship to the world that the sound or image ‘of snow’ necessarily speaks of ‘something else’. The sounds mixed with the words we offer knit together the threads of meaning, creating a poetic space that, like the snow falling while we sleep, gently takes us somewhere other than where we come from, somewhere other than where we thought we were – from snow to exile, from the real to the artificial. By (playing with) spatio-temporal ambiguity, the films/sounds question both the “exoticization” of reality and our false Western position.
[directed by anne penders / additional sounds by éléonore de montesquiou (estonia) and sophie bélair-clément (canada) / production supported by rtbf-scam-promotion des lettres / in china: Vitamin Creative Space (Canton), Vis-à-vis Art Lab (Xiamen) / translation support by xiao xu, xian lei, huang xiaopeng, lu ming and katelijn verstraete / logistical support by l’image latente, (bxl)].
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Writer, artist, phd in art history, anne penders is an interdisciplinary artist working with text, images, sounds, archives, and calling it “writing”. Her work is poetical and political, always trying to question position (both theoretical and territorial) in a troubled world.