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The third episode of A Field Guide to Getting Lost in the Southern Universe (19th Nov) is scripted and recorded based on Keelung Diaries written by the collaborative researcher of the project, Liew Zhou Hau (Malaysia). Adopting a first-person perspective, he visits this harbour city located in the south of the Japanese Empire, and reviews its encounters with human and non-human histories, thus creating a travelogue informed by a planetary vision (and the sonic narrative extended from the writing). Combining archive, image, and text, he explores travel beyond the human, in order to generate environmental connections beyond resource extraction. Liew Zhou Hau is now an assistant professor at the International PhD Program in Taiwan and Transcultural Studies, National Chung Hsing University.
The final episode of the A Field Guide to Getting Lost in the Southern Universe (26th Nov) is based on the Mandarin translation of Liew Zhou Hau’s Keelung Diaries. The translation expands upon this planetary vision by making strange the Anglophone global as described in the text; it challenges audiences across both languages to rethink the idea of connection through linguistic gaps and historical fragments. Due to the incompatible properties of the Mandarin and English languages, this interpretation by theatre performer Cheng Yin-chen and curator Shiu Shiou-hau represents and brings out the unfamiliar in a seemingly familiar soundscape of the harbour.