112 | MAY/JUN 2017 | ISSUE 103
The works deal with secrets and memories. Have you explored
these themes and the Mars context before?The video 1001 Martian Homes is a further development of a small
aspect from my most recent film, Proposal for a Film: Within the
Leaves, a Sight of the Forest (2016), that is part of an ongoing project
of mine in Hong Kong called “Trace/Trade/Transit.” Episode four
of this film starts with a young woman off screen. We don’t see
her, only a time lapse of the port traffic in Hong Kong, a 72-hour
glimpse of ships going in and out condensed into two minutes. She
tells us that her great-grandparents were among the first people on
Mars. They had a daughter on Mars, her grandmother, whom they
had to leave with a surrogate family because they had businesses
between Earth and Mars. They then had another daughter on Earth
who was also raised by a surrogate family. They kept going back
and forth between the planets until they were too old and frail to
return to Mars, and the young woman’s grandmother on Mars was
orphaned. Through the narrative, we learn that this young woman
has relatives—distant relatives, literally—on Earth that she never
knew about.
This story is in fact about my family: around the 1880s, my
Balinese paternal great-grandparents went back and forth between
southern China, decades before it became the People’s Republic of
China, and Bali, well before the formation of Indonesia as we know
it today. They had two sets of children in each place, my grandfather
and granduncle in Bali, and their siblings in southern China. Later
I also discovered that my grandmother actually had half-siblings
in southern China whom she never met. She described them once
to me as “people with the same family name,” and actually went to
find them after Suharto fell in 1998. She eventually found them, but
they couldn’t understand each other because they didn’t speak a
word of each other’s language.
While I was developing “1001 Martian Homes” I thought of
these stories, and it occurred to me that this going back and forth
also explains my own situation. I look at myself, living between
Australia and Indonesia like an amphibian, perhaps like my
great-grandparents.“People say that outer
space is the final frontier.
I think that space is only
the next frontier, as it
seems like humans are
always capable of finding
yet another frontier, or
they’ll start making one.”