Pan Daijing

In Corsica, a woman chooses to care for the earth by burning it.

Murlo, Pan Daijing and MUTEK director Alain Mongeau all feature in this film about the audiovisual realm of electronic music.

As though swept away by a gust of wind that must be fought against as one descends, each step down the staircase is a struggle to find one’s feet. The external descent echoes an internal, psychological descent. As though one descended from a superficial state of consciousness towards a deeper one. The external space and the internal space are deformed by the steps of the staircase. These distortions may add strata of experience to the original. At first indecipherable, our first impressions may include a near-infinite infolding of hidden meanings, which become apparent only when we adjust our anamorphic perspective. Like forgotten companions, witnesses of past battles, slabs of past experiences piled atop each other, whose renewed correspondence is the only possible way of recovering what slumbers within. And yet, going beyond comfortable superficiality is disquieting, at first. For it is a letting go of past lightness, towards a more fragile and sickly state.

Cut together from rehearsals, performances, shootings in Hong Kong and short videos captured during the artist’s travels across the world, the film contains many stories. The film separates (and connects) two distinct states of being “[…] half hope, half fear; that a dog will become a wolf.” This interstitial state translates to a discontinuous editing style, alternating between different times and environments. The central motif is a tunnel. At a metaphorical level, the tunnel could serve as an exit from the unconscious or a means to descend into unknown depths.