St. Moritz Art Film Festival

Swiss Premiere

In Competition

The short documentary film looks into the everyday practice of families in Shigushan village, Wuhan, China. ‘Rippling’ is a way of living, a form of knowledge, and a frame of mind—rooted in precarity. It derives from a context of the dissolved household in contemporary rural China. They are families of China’s 285 million floating population, who have seen the absence of a middle generation. The complexities inherent in the dissolved household interweave traditional socio-cultural roots, a recent history of China’s national collectivisation and the contemporary re-appropriation and reinvention of familial forms towards intergenerational and cross-household dependency. This documentary is a prologue to a transdisciplinary framework—at the intersection of architecture, anthropology, performance, and filmmaking—concerning the articulation of non-discursive, bodily knowledge and how to make it perceived and felt.

The project is currently supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The initial documentary phase was supported by the Driving the Human initiative.