Re:collections / 再次·回顧
Yo-Yo Lin, 2021
About the work
Re:collections / 再次·回顧 remembers lost language in the body, across land and in alternate universes. Following a recent return to the artist’s motherland in Taiwan during the pandemic, the film is a first-person account of returning to a site of medical and familial trauma years later.
Moving through the artist’s intimate thoughts, Re:collections explores the fallibility of time and ambiguousness of placehood in an ever-shifting disabled, immigrant body. Melding together new media performance, self-documentary, and frameworks of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Taoist cosmology, the film interweaves the mundane with the magical, offering openings for grief, wonder, and radical multiplicity.
“Growing up as a child of immigrants, my parents struggled to navigate the medical industrial complex in the US and chose to have all of my medical interventions done in Taiwan. This was a place where they knew the language, had support, and healthcare was affordable. For me, as an American born, I was no longer fluent in our language and often find my “returns” to Taiwan associated with illness — memories of feeling helpless in a hospital bed, not understanding what was happening around me or what was being done to me, my parents finding healer after healer, treatment after treatment to make me somehow “well.””
This is Yo-Yo’s first attempt at creating a bilingual piece in Chinese and English; they would like to thank artist, writer, and friend, Annette, for translating with such care and authenticity to my experience and also Despina, Yo-Yo’s long-time music collaborator, for creating the music from sounds recorded from Taiwan.
Special thanks:
Mom & Dad, Lin Siblings, A-gong, Xie Si Fu, Kuan Zhen, Sean Si Fu, Dr. Zhu, Dr. Chang, Zack Filkoff, Pelenakeke Brown, Yidan Zeng, Jasmine Lin, Avneesh Sarwate, David V Britton, Skylar & Kara, Sean Baptist & Chih-Hwa Yolanda Chen 陳之華. A million thanks to the ancestors and gods that guided me for this project.