“Corneliu Miklosi” Public Transport Museum

The Worldly Cave

From the Minhougeqi Village in Fuzhou, to Menorca in Spain, from Fán Dòng in Shoguan, to the Sea of Inchon, from the foot of Dafu Hill, to the Sonoran Desert, images and reality comprise a booklet which describes the locations. The sites and places. In Zhou Tao’s incredibly beautiful films there are neither scripts, nor stories. Instead the light becomes a protagonist, as do the landscapes. The result is visual ambiguity: what am I actually looking at? Mostly filmed with a steady camera, the ambient films abstain from dialogue—people are typically in the background, or passing, unaware of the camera while often looking at their handheld devices. The earth and that which is the source of all life, light, are at the centre of the film—one of them is rapidly transforming in the era of the Anthropocene and the other seems constant, yet imbued with new meanings.

The Worldly Cave is filmed in Fán Dòng, the place where the Hakka people lived for generations but have all left. Before executing the new development, all the villages on this land will be buried in rolling dunes of muck. In the vast space, huge piles of second-hand machines are stored before being resold in southeast Asian countries. Teams of estate surveyors and valuers gathered in different groups, discussing the potential prices of the land. After passing some huge muck dunes, then between two larger muck dunes, the hunters built their sheltered pits and bird traps suspended in the air. They tied a bee to a transparent string, as it would lead them to the beehives hidden in the cracks. Fishermen even found a source for fish in the swamp connecting groundwater sources, while buffalos are kept on ropes and dogs, foxes and rams rummage about. The men and women in the giant ferrocement caves beneath the clouds still chattering about the bullfrogs from lunch as a new day-to-day life has emerged amid apocalyptic grandiosity. ML