“Waste paper is like a forest. Paper recycles itself, generation after generation,” a man once told Zhang Yin, possibly the richest self-made woman in the world according to Forbes magazine in 2006, who earns her wealth from recycling cardboard waste.
This film envisages the cardboard waste forest from within its leaves, revolving around the Filipino domestic workers at Central, Hong Kong. It poetically plays with ideas of fractals, cycles and (re)generations by criss-crossing between the actual cardboard waste route in Hong Kong and an imagined future-past in Mars.
The six short episodes of the film chronicle the artist’s intervention across the nodes. It interweaves stories told through field recordings, text, real and reimagined interviews, images and composed verses to blur the identities of several subjects by their request. It premieres in the form of a ‘proposal’ in the art fair that is one of these nodes, described in Episode Four.
Watch the film here:
(or here for a slower connection)