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Raffia Li

performance, Lichaam, LGBT, installatie, Dekolonisatie, Conceptueel, Community, Artistiek onderzoek

Raffia Li (TA/they/she), works with poetry melting in minor edges/senses, in forms of performances, videos or installations. In their research, they explore the physicality of words and languages as actions/rituals/sites, to sense the gaps/gates under the signs, break the hegemonic speaking/written words, nurture/hold the in-between meanings and remake the poetic space of relations.\r\n\r\nTheir art practice is deeply influenced by poetry, theatre of the oppressed, reading of Zhuangzi, their field research over Asian shadow puppetry, learning experience of being in a sign language art collective Shape of Language, diary/letter exchanges with friends, their MA study at Dutch Art Institute, observations of their dreaming state, and the river near Grandma 芹’s yard. Their individual and collaborated projects have been presented in Today Art Museum, Guangdong Times Museum, Wuzhen Theatre Festival, Kunstinstituut Melly, Museum Tinguely, Gasworks, Centre Pompidou, and others.

for things not here not now
for things not here not now - performance, 60 min, 2023 with Ekrem Koç, Yunfan Tian and Yanfei Li, in group show The Ground Up And The Washed Down, @A Tale of A Tub, Rotterdam/ A touchable performance is a space providing time a timespace that is trusting/trusted a moving ritual an invocation a critic Desiring Waiting Calling together for things not here not now bring them to here and now within a breathing in a breathing out
Remixing time through bodily poetics
Remixing time through bodily poetics - live and online performance, 60 min, 2023, with miiel ferraz, Yunfan Tian and Yanfei Li, @Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn/ A collective performance explores the relationship between body, time and accessibility. Remixing time through bodily poetics emerges from a dialogue with guest artists, collaborators, organizations and visitors about the systematic and political struggle around access making, but also its world-making poetics.
Remixing time through bodily poetics
Remixing time through bodily poetics - Screenshot from the live and online performance, 60 min, 2023, with miiel ferraz, Yunfan Tian and Yanfei Li, @Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn
on a temporary me, languages, hover - poetry Installation and performance, 2022, @Goethe Institute Soupspoon Open studio, Rotterdam, Netherlands. performers: a lamp, a ladder, a torch, fabrics, a A4 paper, Raffia, Miyoung ,and gradually joining poems on paper - Almost, you almost become god again - ??? Sun shuqin, the shaman was dancing all around her, singing in smoke - To look for something like a language / The shape of the installation slowly shifts throughout the ritual-performance. The ritual-performance is dedicated to body in resistance and their possible healing. Three poems are searching for their different relationality through movements of the performing artist, light, shadows, carrying the stories of three women lost their names in the "investigation" of their human-trafficking case, Grandma Qin, and the moment of almost becoming tree/god again.
penumbra, shadow of shadow asks - poetry installation single-channel video 6 min 30 secs, 2022 @ Imaginary Z Gallery, Hangzhou, China/ Poems look into their mirrors, shadows, shapes and lands, practising the formation of a longing, a memory, a ritual. How does the body performs the desire of words/objects to move?
?? - video and sign language poetry series, 2021-2022 /Nature is never outside us. All corners of the urban space have long been inseparable from our bodies. Refusing the human/nature division means that we need to be in constant conversation with the more-than-human world, and keep inviting other movements into us: becoming otherwise, and in this case, becoming birds. In ?? series, I invite my friends and collaborators Yanfei and Baizong to translate some of my bird video works into sign language, and it soon become a dance with the birds, and our collective choreography through which we expand and shape each other. By watching/filming the steps, pauses, dives, gazes of birds, and transforming them into our own body through signing, could we inhabitie the birds? When our body is the study room to listen to nature, would we find other ways of communicating, encountering and being, would we start to remember the rituals of dreaming and transforming???
Sometimes a feather  - video, 6 min 19 secs, 2022, in ? ? video and sign language poetry series with Yanfei Li, in Zhongshan, China, and Rotterdam, Netherlands
To all the shapes falling at different/the same present/absent times/time I-? we/us-?? you-?/?? They- TA/TA?, (                                                                                                                                                - single-channel video and performance, 20 min, 2021 performers: Raffia Li, Miiel Ferráez, Marie Tucková´, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Miyoung Chang, Maoyi, and Yanfei Li (in video) at Understory Chant, The Dutch Art Institute, in collaboration with Sonsbeek 20- 24, 25 August 2021, Posttheater, Arnhem, Netherlands / How do we find rhythm with each other? How does language connect us with each other, and how is this rhythm disrupted by the virus? A playfulness emerges, a melancholy, through food, through song, through which we may or may not have belonging. I'm struck by the vignettes, the disruption of theater space, which becomes a microcosm of the disruption of the study program, finding a place to be in the Netherlands…ways to find commonality and how to cross borders, how to bridge corners, how to care for each other in this time. (Review by Barbie Asante)
? ? ? How do I lose I - single-channel video and performance, 20-30 min, 2021 performers: Raffia Li, Miiel Ferráez, Iga Swiesciak, and Yanfei Li (in video) at Performing Arts Forum, Saint-Erme-Outre-et-Ramecourt, France/ This performance is a playful and expansive research about languages ??as sites/landscapes for collective subjectivity, working through an ancient text from Zhuangzi, a Taoist literature, and the different definitions of an “I” in Chinese characters, as “?”, a position of holding a weapon, or a kind of tilting ; as “?”, the five entrances/exits in the encountering and sensing. What would happen if ? can lose ?? It plays with the body in action of writing “?-I” with hand and chopsticks, in the air, and on water, on purposely producing the kind of writing that would disappear, playing with the idea of ??a constantly disappearing “I”, but also bringing up front the question of what counts as writing, and criticszing the performance itself using a highly sighted and hearing oriented format, reflecting the hierarchy of senses in a neurotypical world.
Touch? Tapping is so00 nice! - Lecture performance, 20-25 min, 2020 English Voice: Francesca Hawker Performed at Radio Kootwijk, Netherlands/This lecture performance is a post-ableist experiment through multi-layering of languages, and the in-betweens. It is mainly delivered through me typing, with my friend Francesca’s voice reading out what appears on the screen. It challenges the expectations of an ableist “efficient”society, and creates pauses, time to breathe, space for mistakes and the playfulness of delay. The shifts between American sign language, Chinese sign language, spoken and written Chinese, and English, makes“the fluidity and new body land” possible, as what I have learnt/unlearnt from being with my Deaf friends and collaborators. It also tapped into Protactile movement and language, lead by the DeafBlind community in the U.S, and John Lee Clark’s Protactile poem based on touch, and his Distantism theory criticizing “the privileging of the distance senses of hearing and vision”, bringing the audience into the in-between languages, gestures, and the possibilities in the not-yet-becoming.

The Ensemble of Moans

Datum:
Locatie: Centre Pompidou
In samenwerking met: Centre Pompidou

The Ensemble of Moans, Marie Tučková in collaboration with Mariana Hradilková, Raffia Li and Rebeka Maxová, Festival MOVE, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.

https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/programme/agenda/evenement/h1jD7i2

INVESTIGATING THE DIALECTIC OF ARRIVAL

Datum:
Locatie: Goethe-Institut Rotterdam
In samenwerking met: Goethe-Institut Rotterdam

Soupspoon collective residency.

https://www.goethe.de/ins/nl/nl/kul/gin/ssp.html

Descending Notes

Datum:
Locatie: Gasworks
In samenwerking met: Gasworks

Descending Notes. Video. 20 mins. Lou Lou Sainsbury in collaboration with Ada M Patterson and Raffia Li. 2022. Commissioned by Gasworks for Lou Lou Sainsbury's exhibition Earth is a Deadname, Freelands Gasworks Partnership.

https://www.gasworks.org.uk/exhibitions/earth-is-a-deadname/

Shaping words Melting words

Datum:
Locatie: Kunstinstituut Melly
In samenwerking met: Kunstinstituut Melly

Body and language workshop, with Jascha Blume.

https://www.kunstinstituutmelly.nl/en/engage/1302-training-shaping-words-melting-words
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