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2024
Single-channel video
3:03min
Brooklyn Has No Mountain begins with family footage of a child’s first birthday dinner in his hometown in China, decades before he would migrate alone to Brooklyn in his twenties. Extracting the archival video frame by frame, Shi turns a domestic record into a sequential still-image body and maps it onto an impossible virtual terrain. Original footage and rendered animation drift in and out of one another, as if memory were both surface and weather.
Though Brooklyn has no mountain, the work imagines migration as moving through a canyon: the future blocked by absurd forms, the past returning as orientation. Therefore, the video traces a quiet psychological condition of settlement, a constant search for “the better future”— how looking forward often requires looking back.
Sound excerpted from “Hallelu Ya Hallelu Me” by Okay Kaya.