Mouth of the River
Venue
MoCA TAIPEI
Year
2021
Location
Taiwan
Ｍaterial
Audio description [Chinese] 18'00", surround 7.1, sound installation. Cement fiberboard structure, window films, natural lighting
Mouth of the River represents the fragmented space by the river embankment, together with moving pedestrians, traffic flow and time. Using soundscapes, the work manifests a theater without performers by re-arranging various ambient sounds as clues to prompt the audience’s visualized imagination, retrieving every forgotten (overlooked) image through audio description.
Concrete embankments separate people and water, people and the environment as well as the present and the past.
The work features stories of people being uprooted as their houses were demolished by past flood control policies underneath modernized urban facilities, such as elevated bridges and concrete embankments. Facing the pandemic, the artist duo employs the method of online field research in finding relevant historical materials about the disappeared “Zhouho Village” during the implementation of flood control measures. The rice fields in Zhouho Village were overwhelmed by seawater after Shizitou Pass exploded in the name of flood control. The flood control policy not only did not solve the problem of flooding after typhoons but also caused soil salinization. Furthermore, building restriction and relocation dictated by the hydro policy eventually led to protests over relocation that destabilized the martial law system, which had confined the entire Taiwanese society.
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