Homesick for Another World: a film unfolding in space

About the show:

Traversing different societies, time periods, and political struggles, Homesick for Another World unfolds as a hybrid experience mixing live-film, lecture-performance, and theater.
From Mei Liu’s 3-year artistic research, the work dives into the world of lucid dreaming under oppressive systems exemplified by physical confinements, juxtaposing the access to cosmic, spiritual freedom with the dark socio, bio-political reality.

Documentary footage, oral histories, dreams, speculative fiction, and personal reflection are interweaved to collapse time-space. With both humor and insight, the work asks how collective consciousness and memory might offer alternative imaginaries for solidarity and resistance.

Bio:

Mei Liu is an interdisciplinary artist from Shanghai, now based in Amsterdam. With a background in documentary filmmaking and artistic research, her current practice is an exercise in world building through performance, workshops, collective gatherings and film. Her work is process-driven, polyphonic and communal, considering the body as a site where the spiritual and political come together. Guided by questions such as, “What is freedom?” and “What makes us human?,” she works with methods including lucid dreaming, oral history, improvisation and live performance. Through these, she brings forward erased histories, disappeared voices and other ghosts from invisible realms, those repressed, rejected or forgotten.

Mei Liu is an alumna of Artistic Research in and through Cinema MA at Netherlands Film Academy and Film Production BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She participated in the Venice Biennale College Blend, Apichatpong Weerasethakul film lab, and Forecast Mentorship. She has previously shown work at the Eye Filmmuseum, Fringe Amsterdam, Theater Commons Tokyo, Radialsystem Berlin. She is currently an artist in residence at Jan van Eyck Academie.

She co-founded Cenote Workshops in Shanghai and Electric Shadows studio in Amsterdam.

Credits:

Concept: Mei Liu
Writing / Performers: Mei Liu, Malaz Usta
Installation Collaborator: Xinyi Mei
Producer: Mei Liu, Helen Tsang
Support: AFK 3Package Deal, Forecast Mentorship with Lieko Shiga, Norma Fonds, Amarte Fonds, Master of Film – Netherlands Film Academy, Electric Shadows studio
Advisors: Lieko Shiga, Rabih Mroué, Sister Sylvester, Nduka Mntambo, Billy Mullaney