The Othered Scene

When words pass from one person to another, whose do they become? Revisiting a post-war plague on Quemoy, memories of a survivor gather drifting fragments: a 16mm travelogue, charcoal drawings, electronic sound, and spoken testimony, forming a layered meditation on transmission and the unstable ownership of stories.

Yen Wang-yun: 'The Othered Scene starts with a question of language: to whom do words belong when they pass from one person to another through storytelling? Here the words trace back to the plague on the Quemoy Islands during the immediate post-war period in Taiwan. Two acts of digging lie at the heart of the tales: digging graves and digging for white clay. To uncover anecdotes related to disease and death, this experimental documentary interweaves a 16mm film travelogue, a meditation on the archive through charcoal drawing, electronic sound composition, and voice.

In assembling fragments of memory and historical sources, The Othered Scene forms part of an ongoing project to set loose the identity of the islanders from any fixed historical narrative. The reminiscence of a plague survivor becomes a meeting ground for fragments from the island's past — a field of infinite possibilities for the ritual of narration.’