Perhaps, She Comes From/To ____ Alang
她可能來至__社

Performance and Concept: Anchi Lin [Ciwas Tahos] / Project assistant:
Julia Lin Kingham / Atayal language consultant: Apang Bway (劉芝芳) / Voice contributors: Apang Bway (劉芝芳), Yukan Maray (林孝緒), Yukan Masa (許雍) / Virtual technician: Wei-Hsuan Hung (洪偉瑄)

• Double-channel HD Video, sound, colour, duration 11 mins 23 secs (looped), 2020

《她可能來至__社》此作品結合泰雅族口述故事Temahahoi（直譯：在深林裡的某一個地方）裡面所提起女人可以與蜜蜂（土蜂）溝通和土地之間的關係，此古老的故事對創作者來說是屬於酷兒族群的空間，它們在深林裡面所建構的避居地，避開異性戀為本體的空間，故事裡給予一個警示，它們的生存依賴著自然生態的維持。錄像裡的故事結構結合三個敘事脈絡來探討身份認同、性別、族群、口傳故事、土地流失和散離經驗。Temahahoi、鎮西堡部落耆老們所提到日據時代日本人送給他們的黃銅鍋造成部分族人有不孕的狀態反應到我的身體性別和對於沒有土地的離散經驗，一種嚮往擁有土地的座標，讓我不經意的轉換和寄託這樣的感覺到網路雲端，再創一個第三空間，同時也是一個地址（座標）https://raxal-mu.glitch.me（直譯：我的土地、當機的我），這個雲端空間會隨著我的知識或故事的增加而慢慢延展擴大。

Perhaps, She Comes From/To ____ Alang weaves together three different narratives to re-examine queerness, gender, oral history, and displacement from land lost. The inspiration draws from the oral narrative that connects the relationship between bees and the land in the telling of the place of Temahahoi. This place, where only women and gender non-conforming people live, is fused with Ciwas's gender performance and affinity to their own quiet queer body in relation to the feeling of displacement and diaspora. A third story incorporated into the work tells of a historical incident from the Japanese colonial period Ciwas heard from elders in qalang Cinsbu (Atayal Cinsbu community) in Hsinchu, Taiwan, concerning brass pots gifted to the tribal community members by the colonizers that caused infertility amongst many Indigenous people. Continuing and combining these oral herstories, Ciwas responded to her deep desire to have a specific qalang landmark and 'sense of place', by creating a queer 'cultural landscape' as an online cloud space that is a virtual land in the space of the Internet. This project reflects Ciwas's desire to connect to their ancestral land (now a National park and threatened by landslides) to pin forward towards an Internet address https://raxal-mu.glitch.me (raxal mu – meaning my land) that uses the Internet space to expand cultural knowledge and queer connections beyond the soil and into the cloud.

* Alang or qalang means tribe or community in pan-Atayal language.

This work was supported by 2020 Pulima Art Festival - Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Foundation.

Live performance piece dependent on location