Curated by Elysa WENDI

In an age where digital technologies reshape how we access, preserve, and reimagine cultural memory, this collection examines the intersection between contemporary media and archival traces of embodied practices. “Perhaps, I Can See The Past” investigates how current technological tools function as time machines for recovering, reinterpreting, and revitalising ancient dance and ritual forms.

The selected works demonstrate diverse approaches to this technological archaeology of the body. Shon Kim’s Bookanima: Dance employs chronophotography to resurrect movement across cultural boundaries, while Daniel Belton’s PEPE (Moth Dances) merges traditional Māori taonga pūoro with digital art, creating pathways between ancestral memory and contemporary expression. Choy Kar Fai’s Unbearable Darkness pushes further into speculative territory, using gaming technology to explore the afterlives of Butoh through virtual embodiment.

These technological interventions actively reconstruct, reimagine, and sometimes fabricate new relationships with cultural practices that might otherwise remain inaccessible. From Onyeka Igwe’s contemporary dancers reimagining Nigerian protest rituals, to Caroline Garcia’s Imperial Reminiscence inserting herself into Hollywood dance sequences to expose hidden histories of cultural appropriation, to Markku Lehmuskallio’s documentation of Viennese-Karelian wedding dances, each work reveals how the machine’s gaze can both preserve and transform our understanding of embodied heritage.

Beyond concerns of historical  and technological accuracy, these works perhaps reveal how contemporary machines enable us to see—and move through—the past never fully visible before.

The Dance of Life

Spring
Nature wakes up
Birds dancing
After the wedding dances follow autumn
Humans are lost, locked for
That kind is The Dance of Life

The film documented the dancers of the Helsinki Youth Society performing the old Viennese-Karelian wedding dance; while these images are juxtaposed to the dance of birds, composing the symphony of nature.  It also reflected the director’s connection to humanity in the state of his mind in 1975’s Finland. 

Director / Markku LEHMUSKALLIO
Finland / 1975 / 14‘30

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PEPE (Moth Dances)

PEPE (Moth Dances) is a short film fusing taonga pūoro, contemporary dance, and digital art. Featuring Nancy Wijohn as a solo traveller embodying Hineraukatauri, the work draws on the cocoon-like form of the pūtōrino and the case moth as metaphors for transformation. Silk, breath, and mycelial webs shape a sensory journey through ancestral memory and future vision. The project is a ritual of sound, motion, and spirit, rooted in Te Ao Māori and resonating across time.

Director / Daniel BELTON
New Zealand / 2024 / 10‘10

Garifuna International Indigenous Film Festival (2024)
Dunedin Arts Festival (2025)
Māoriland Film Festival (2025)
Hawaii International Film Awards (2025)
Swedish International Film Festival (2025)
Doc Edge Festival (2025)

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Sitting On A Man

Traditionally, women in Igbo speaking parts of Nigeria, came together to protest the behaviour of men by sitting on or making war on them by adorning themselves with palm fronds, dancing and singing protest songs outside the man in question’s home . This practice became infamous due its prominence as a tactic in the Aba Women’s War, the 1929 all woman protest against colonial rule. Two contemporary dancers reimagine the practice, drawing on both archival research and their own experiences. 

Director / Onyeka IGWE
United Kingdom / 2018 / 6‘56 / English

International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands (2018)
Smithsonian African American Film Festival, Washington, D.C. (2018)
Black British Shorts II, Glasgow International, UK (2018)
Black Lens, Khiasma, Paris, France (2018)
Berwick Film Festival, UK (2019)
Images Festival, Toronto, Canada (2019)
MUNTREF, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2019)

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Bookanima: Dance

BOOKANIMA, a compound word of ‘Book’ and ‘Anima’, is Experimental Animation to give new cinematic life to books. It aims to create ‘Book Cinema’ in the third scope between Book and Cinema by Chronophotography Animation, paying homage to Edward Muybridge and Entienne-Jules Marey.  BOOKANIMA experiments Chronophotography Animation about Dance along with dance flow: Ballet-Korean Dance-Modern Dance-Jazz Dance-Aerial Silk-Tap dance-Aerobic-Disco-Break Dance-Hip Hop-Social Dance. 

Director / Shon KIM
Korea / 2018 / 7‘30

NOWNESS ASIA (2020)
Tanzahoi Festival, Germany (2020)
explodingcinema.org (2025)

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Imperial Reminiscence

Imperial Reminiscence is a cinematic voyage of misguided desire (illegitimate and guilt-free) that traverses fantasies of cultural otherness. It reviews the historical and ongoing Western narrative of whitewashing in Hollywood films and brings attention to these racial transgressions that continue to oppress non-hegemonic bodies through her acts of mimesis and green-screening, to sample popular culture and colonial imagery in playful and humorous ways.

Directoe / Caroline GARCIA
Australia / 2018 / 10’16

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) (2018)
New England Regional Art Museum (2019)
Post Office Gallery Ballarat (2019)
The Centre of Contemporary Photography (online) (2020)
Salzburger Kunstverein (2020)
A.I.R. Biennale (online) (2021)

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Unbearable Darkness Game Demo

Unbearable Darkness Game Demo is an experimental third-person, non-action, docu-adventure game inspired by the afterlives of Butoh dance master Tatsumi Hijikata. It is a recollection of thoughts, movements and expeditions into the world of Butoh. How does the digital, the virtual, the immaterial or non-human expressions collapse and expand the notion of wandering. Unbearable Darkness Game Demo wanders into a capsule of paranormal dance experience, of speculative documentary and rendered dreams.

Director / CHOY Kar Fai
Germany, Japan / 2021 / 12‘37 / Japanese, English

Romaeuropa Festival: 2023
SPRING Utrecht festival: 2024
Kyoto Experiment: 2019
TPAM – Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama: 2018