Title:
Birds, Trees, Grass, Land, …, and I 迁徙
Year:
2020
Running time:
4:12 minutes
Format:
documentary audio-video
Location:
Melbourne, Australia
This documentary audio-video artwork focuses on the relationships between racial and colonial domination and the environment. I was inspired by my personal experience of migrating and the learning and life experiences on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri people about respect to nature and the land. I adopt the methodology of “Decolonial Ecology” raised by Malcom Ferdinand to emphasize the importance of recognizing the unseparated relationships between environmental movements and anti-racist and anti-colonial movements.
The birds recorded in the video are used as the metaphor of myself as a migrant. Starting the bushwalk from an industrial world, when I walk on the Yarra River Trail, I think about the history and culture of the land, look at the passers-by from diverse backgrounds, and discover myself. I see myself as the same as a bird, a stone, or a leaf and people as same as animals and plants, we all are life on Earth. And I think of the importance of making peace with each other, the earth, and ourselves. Through this work, I hope to raise public concern about the human activities that how we appropriated the planet and how we could, can, or will work together to build a better world.