Nation Family

Nation Family is a project by artist Dinu Li in collaboration with his own cousin over a seven-year period. Together, they have revisited a former labour camp where Li’s relative was sent as a nineteen-year-old to work in a rubber plantation. Now one of the most popular holiday destinations for China’s booming domestic tourist industry, the cousin’s past life is recounted in Nation Family, by a former comrade and a female peasant. Shifting through fragmented time zones, various renditions of Doctor Zhivago’s theme tune haunts the woodlands and vacant hotel rooms, building to an illogical grand finale of a disco dance routine.

Filmed in unnamed destinations, Nation Family examines the complexities of individual and collective identities as lived experiences meanders through a web of contradictions and figments of the imagination. Anecdotes of a cousin’s toil, dedication and unstinting loyalty to the party line are jettisoned by conflicting accounts of his regular escapades and unique idiosyncrasies, allowing him to imagine music from a make-believe radio self-made out of brick and bamboo shoot. Nation Family considers the potential for place to accumulate dormant histories, awaiting evocation.

• http://www.orieldavies.org/en/open2018
• https://vimeo.com/269090243