Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xiaolu Guo

We will show Film Clips from ‘FIVE MAN AND A CARAVAGGIO’ AND ’THREE SHORT FILMS ABOUT HOME’ and participants are asked to read two chapters from Guo's book ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE EAST: A STORY OF GROWING UP (Chapters: THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY, and EUROPE, IN THE LAND OF NOMADS). We will also discuss how people (including the participants of this workshop), not only the ones who have migrated and reconstructed their lives, but also those who have never left home, project their own aesthetic identity into an imaginary world. This workshop will show some film clips from filmmaker and writer Xiaolu Guo about immigrants, about their life, and about how people find the idea of home and belonging in art, and the idea of their own artistic self image. In most cases, their particular body structures change to reflect and to adapt to their alien environments. The migrant plants might die or they might survive. We might be uprooted and transplanted, like gum trees trying to grow in the northern hemisphere, or like roses sprouting from under snow in a northern climate. Maybe one day, all of us will be migrants. In China, perhaps one in every two people is a migrant. Later, in our life, we search for a new home, constructing a new identity, hoping to find somewhere or something to belong to.Īs John Berger wrote in the 1970s, one in every seven people in Europe was a migrant. Sometimes, we even lose our identity by leaving this home. Once we leave ‘home’, we break with our roots.

Michaela Schäuble | Universität Bern / Media Anthropology (Moderation) An afternoon with Xiaolu Guo Author/Filmmaker, China/England | Friedrich Dürrenmatt Guest Professor Spring 2018 Prof.

Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xiaolu Guo