Nothing to do here but wait, 2024-
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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.
Directed and written by Amiko Li
Visual effect design by Ryan Woodring
Graphic Design by Daedalus Li
Edited by Chelbaum Zhong
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.
Directed and written by Amiko Li
Visual effect design by Ryan Woodring
Graphic Design by Daedalus Li
Edited by Chelbaum Zhong
Copyedit by Asa Chen Zhang