(Tending) (to) (Ta): Beginnings

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  • (Tending) (to) (Ta): Beginnings

  • Artist: April Lin 林森
  • Year: 2021
  • Duration: 27:14
  • Country: United Kingdom
  •  Tending) (to) (Ta): Beginnings is an excerpt from Lin's narrative-led speculative fiction film grounding itself in ‘tā’, the monosyllabic sound which in Mandarin Chinese encompasses all third person pronouns: 他 (third person male), 她 (third person female), and 它 (more-than-human lifeforms and objects). As these multiple genders and modes of being are all pronounced ‘tā’, the word ‘ta’ has in recent years been reconfigured and adopted as a gender neutral pronoun in colloquial contexts in Mainland China, in queer spaces and beyond. In the film, Lin casts ‘ta’ as an infinite cosmic entity with a proper noun Ta, who exists across universes and is present in all beings and matter.

    The film follows an exchange of internal letters between two protagonists who imagine one another across parallel dimensions. Each communicating to an envisioned other, who exists as a possibility beyond their self-perceived boundaries of reality, these two beings meet in a shared world of imagination. In this reciprocal reach for the unknown, a world that bears an uncanny resemblance to our contemporary reality – colonised by Western capitalist constructs of race, gender and class, and characterised by a collective distance from Ta – opens a portal to another realm.

  • Accession #: 7184
  • Distribution Status: In Distribution
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