Song of Maldoror

During the absolute confinement of the 2022-2023 COVID lockdowns, human agency was reduced to rubble. Driven by profound anxiety in the absence of freedom, I climbed over my dormitory wall to escape, initiating an aimless drift toward places where the shadow of control was less absolute. I was drawn to an abandoned building, the ERA Film Factory—originally China's first photographic film factory, now existing in a state of unmanaged disorder following a total cessation of production. Situated at the margins of social structure, this 'empty lot' became a place of freedom where ruins revert to the purest, non-purposive essence of architecture itself. It was thus imbued with a new context of practice, transforming into a radical space for my photographic and performative interventions.

My intervention here invokes Lautréamont, positioning it as a deliberate act of transgression. Embodying the "gravedigger" excavating these derelict spaces, I attempted to locate the "ruins of the human" within both the physical architecture and myself. Here, the collapse of physical space and the rupture of psychological order overlap, and the highly corporeal acts of scaling the wall and drifting constitute the ultimate response to this dual ruin.