Down the Eye of Polyphemos, 2024

4min09s

Montage by Liao Wen

Sound by Anita Pan



https://vimeo.com/993550051



The title of the video is inspired by the one-eyed cyclops who was tricked and blinded by Odysseus and other human settlers in the Odyssey. Footages of industrial practice and natural phenomena are interspersed with scenes that depict brutal acts against the body and anatomical drawings that reveal the insides of organisms. The work hopes to interrogate the violence embedded in human hands, manmade tools, and, by extension, everyday scientific and manufactural activities.

The imageries of the blinded cyclops who were wronged by human-centric morals, as well as the sliced eye from Un Chien Andalou, revoke the priority of the eye, shifting the priority of senses to touch and ‘gut feelings’ in response to my continuous exploration of the abject. The pupil refocuses at some point, refreshing the vision before re-centering on representations of hands that repeatedly perform acts that commit violence against others in what seems to be a ritualistic behavior.

The act of penetration, in certain cultures, forms an important part of rituals. The Brazilian indigenous people Bororo believe that piercing the soft parts of the body (ears, nostrils, lips, etc.) and replacing them with hard and indecomposable things like fingernails, claws, teeth, and shells will protect the bodily orifices from exposure to evil influences. In the video, I attempt to juxtapose these acts of life preservation with weird, human-invented rituals, where penetration – like wood drilling, mechanical fish slicing, and pearl beading – is used as a tool of productivity at the expense of other species.