Promptbooks, Board Game, Video, Performances and Installations.
Installations exibition/ Foraging in Idleness, open studio visit, Moira Expo, Utrecht.(2021)
Text and Video launch/ STIL(TE) / STILL(NESS, Stichting Simulacrum, Amsterdam
Performance and Installations/ If Not Now, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht.(2020)
Photo Credit: Alëna Vinokurova & Chun-Yao Lin
Travelogues with Prompts shares its name between a promptbook, a video, a performance and an installation. Informed by Yu’s personal experience as a migrant in the Netherlands, the work revolves around the confusion of finding oneself constantly moving between two very different but equally precarious situations—being othered by the dominant values of the host country, whilst feeling estranged from one’s hometown as a returnee. Taking the position of a tourist, Yu relates her personal reflections to the global trend of travel and migration.
The work centers on four narratives, or “scenes”, including a fictional story, a real-life incident, a set of looping conversations and a karaoke party. The scenes were collected at different moments during M.C. Julie Yu’s stay in Europe and have been transformed into a variety of formats along the way. The performance, videos and promptbooks are set in relation to a tourist tent, which signifies a life in movement. As the viewer faces a dilemma—do they enter the tent or not?—, their wondering reveals the work’s core question: while constantly moving in-between worlds, how do we position ourselves in terms of belonging?
Scene 1/ Chris
A fictional poetic story that depicts a character, Chris, who keeps moving and stays in the role of tourist. So that to avoid any deeper conversation about who Chris is.
The character, Chris, is an image of all tourist, who enjoys capitalism tourism in the most shallow way. However, when Chris couldn’t travel anymore, due to some unknown reasons, Chris needs to confront the deeper reality and facing Chris’s fragile identity.
Scene 2/ A Tourist’s Trip
A first-person perspective travelogue about a postcard that turns a casual trip into an investigation of an unknown feeling of oppression. I, the traveler, describe the story with a naive attitude to European students' cultural experience until a nationalities-mistaken postcard from a theatre group drags me into a confusion and rage mood.
Scene 3/ Pendulums
This scene consists of 9 minimalist conversations, that each conversation can be looped in some way or another. These conversations show the back and forth movement of a migrant, who can’t anchor the sense of belonging, either in the hometown of the past, or the hosting country in the present.
Scene 4/ Karaoke
All the characters from the previous scenes came out to sing karaoke together. Include the one being there, and being mentioned. So are the non-conventional characters, such as the touristy points, the traveling objects, the songs, and the events.
