Nothing to do here but wait, 2025
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Nothing to do here but wait is a monologue film that brings to the fore the elevator as a seemingly nondescript space of waiting common to the urban everyday. It also posits the elevator as a metaphor of temporary dwelling that causes one to be hyper-aware of one’s existence and orientation. The motif of “waiting” relates especially to our pandemic experience: when in lockdown or quarantine, we long for the return of social intimacy but have to wait it out – just like when caught in between movements, the elevator-rider is suspended in stasis. I also consider my effort a “minor imagination” of the elevator - in the spirit of Gilles Deleuze's idea of a “minor literature” that releases new potentials out of a given normal - one that brings the elevator beyond its confined route of operation, its linear logic, and its life as a spatial symbol. The entire curation is intentionally slow-paced. In a time when the audience’s attention can be seen as capital, it is most generous to those willing to invest time and attention, which challenges the expectation that a work of art should be an attention-grabbing spectacle. Fusing these with my own fragmented memories of elevator-riding growing up in Shanghai and other urban locations, I also intend to explore the elevator's mediation between the public and the private. Interspersing my project with words in more than one tongue, I allow syntax to freely unfold and grammar to fracture, letting the spatial-temporal situatedness of language to guide my work. In this way, I attend to the weight and intensity of our thoughts and emotions in the elevator space, presenting them in their rawest without hastening to name them.
Director and Writer: Amiko Li
Editor: Chelbaum Zhong
3D Modeling: Ryan Woodring
Animation: Ryan Woodring, Chelbaum Zhong
Voice: Pablo Causa, Richard Diamond
Copyedit by Asa Chen Zhang
Nothing to do here but wait is a monologue film that brings to the fore the elevator as a seemingly nondescript space of waiting common to the urban everyday. It also posits the elevator as a metaphor of temporary dwelling that causes one to be hyper-aware of one’s existence and orientation. The motif of “waiting” relates especially to our pandemic experience: when in lockdown or quarantine, we long for the return of social intimacy but have to wait it out – just like when caught in between movements, the elevator-rider is suspended in stasis. I also consider my effort a “minor imagination” of the elevator - in the spirit of Gilles Deleuze's idea of a “minor literature” that releases new potentials out of a given normal - one that brings the elevator beyond its confined route of operation, its linear logic, and its life as a spatial symbol. The entire curation is intentionally slow-paced. In a time when the audience’s attention can be seen as capital, it is most generous to those willing to invest time and attention, which challenges the expectation that a work of art should be an attention-grabbing spectacle. Fusing these with my own fragmented memories of elevator-riding growing up in Shanghai and other urban locations, I also intend to explore the elevator's mediation between the public and the private. Interspersing my project with words in more than one tongue, I allow syntax to freely unfold and grammar to fracture, letting the spatial-temporal situatedness of language to guide my work. In this way, I attend to the weight and intensity of our thoughts and emotions in the elevator space, presenting them in their rawest without hastening to name them.
Director and Writer: Amiko Li
Editor: Chelbaum Zhong
3D Modeling: Ryan Woodring
Animation: Ryan Woodring, Chelbaum Zhong
Voice: Pablo Causa, Richard Diamond
Copyedit by Asa Chen Zhang