CREATIVE WORKS
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
WRITING & CURATION
Video, Performance, Choreography
2020
2020
Hengli is a collaboration between artist Ahaad Alamoudi and artist and curator Mengna Da. A dance performance, a video, and a co-writing practice, this work discusses notions of (mis)translation, memory building, and body.
The work is first presented at The Design Museum (London)’s online project Memory Collective.
Watch the video here.
Filmed in front of Brooklyn’s Immigration Office, the video imagines a future where human beings invent Hengli, a universal language agent that can be understood by anyone. Where all languages – English, Arabic, Chinese, etc. – are banned by the governments to ensure total transparency in their citizens’ communication. Yet, when the duo (wE) lose Hengli, they have to explore communication and memory building through different means: their bodies. The piece highlights the struggles, friction and tension that occur when information is morphed through translated dialogues and movements.
Through our research into memory we found that a lot of it loses its truth through the passage of time and institutional erasure. The more memories accumulate the harder it becomes for us to form a factual image of the past. As a result we focused our research on the collapse of memory, in parallel with the collapse of translation. How truth is shaped by translation? What is lost and what stays? Who gets to decide what to keep or not? How does memory exist outside of ourselves and when and where does memory fall into ruin?
The piece was created with help from cinematographers Xin Fang and Abdullah Alamoudi.