When we strike heavily
2025
Video and sound, 4K color
Duration 05'45''
This video explores the alienation between contemporary female identity and artificial flowers — a beauty perfected yet stripped of emotional substance. Like artificial blooms, dazzling yet devoid of life, femininity becomes plasticized by media narratives and the machinery of consumerism. It transforms into a synthetic veneer masking the frozen reality of hyper-urbanization and social alienation.
Visually, the narrative draws inspiration from Maya Deren’s cinematic explorations of the threshold between dream and reality, deliberately blurring these boundaries. The protagonist, in ritualistic movements as if in a trance, relentlessly strikes the reinforced concrete walls of shopping malls. This act symbolizes both revolt against dehumanizing urban sprawl and the intimate struggle of an individual trapped within the gears of materialism.
The influence of Pipilotti Rist manifests in transforming fragility into subversive strength: just as Rist smashes windshields with a flower in Ever Is Over All (1997), our heroine uses her repetitive motions to assault the symbolic architecture of consumerism. Each impact against these illusory yet omnipresent structures embodies catharsis — rage against the established order and a silent cry for suffocated authenticity.
This project interrogates the institutional fabrication of identities and desires. It delivers an aesthetic critique of systems that reduce bodies to commodities and emotions to predetermined scripts.
Here, artificial flowers represent not merely standardized femininity, but function as existential prostheses in a world where even rebellion must be "aesthetically compliant." Their immutable radiance becomes a mirror to our own contradictions: simultaneously craving living vulnerability yet worshipping the polished icons of marketable perfection.