For this second instalment of From Here a Home Was Imagined, Qigemu’s Reality Fragments 160921 will screen on Annex between December 9 – 16 alongside an interview with the artists. Collecting footage the artists shot from a summer they spent together, Reality Fragments 160921 is a docu-fiction which reflects on the validity of memory, yearning and the negotiation of distance in their relationship. Written and edited remotely through Skype between Los Angeles and Stockholm, the film incorporates its own material production alongside mythology to enact a deeply intimate yet generous form of self-representation. The film is captioned in both English and Mandarin.

In an interview with Associate Film Programmer Donald Butler the artists discuss the film as a form of souvenir keeping or archiving for their future selves. They also discuss the importance of representing non-binary relationships in contemporary art, particularly by people of colour and how queer world building allows for this sharing.

七个木 Qigemu 七個木 is a duo consisting of lovers April Lin and Jasmine Lin exploring the interstices of movement, visual media, identity, and the global Asian diaspora as respectively, Chinese-Swedish and Taiwanese-American. Using the potential of this hybrid space, Qigemu engages in conversations dealing with bodies, information, and energies, and how these are conceptualized in the Internet Age. A central element of Qigemu’s creative process is learning to understand the growth of their relationship and of themselves, and no endeavor that is embarked on, whether analytical, emotional, or spiritual, is impersonal nor detached. Qigemu is committed to broadening what it means to be queer and Asian, constructing alternative narratives of subversive existence grounded in un-learning and un-teaching exclusionary ways of movement and existence.

Donald Butler is an artist, writer and programmer based in Glasgow. Their programme From Here a Home Was Imagined is supported by Film Hub Scotland’s New Promoters project and reflects on how nostalgia is imbued in contemporary queer discourse. Butler is co-founder of Tendency Towards, an artist-led project based in Aberdeen, and has had writing published in MAP Magazine, The Skinny, LUX Scotland and The Common Guild. Their practice is an infected body, a stain of immorality, the site of contagion; it looks to viral transmission as a relational method and as a system for the display of information. It is haunted by trauma and is steeped in complex interconnectedness.

This programme is supported by Film Hub Scotland, part of the BFI’s Film Audience Network, and funded by Screen Scotland and Lottery funding from the BFI.

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