Dutch design week 2021，
photo by Pierre Castignola

INSTRUCTIONS


Voice
Practice bad English, re-learn the strongest accent from your hometown, find how you used to sound when you practice English in your homeland.


Dress
Dress up as the same as your old style, even they are bad taste, or they are too fancy, or they are fake well-known European luxury brand made in a Chinese village.


Room
Re-arrange your home like how your family does it back home. eg. Fill in the gaps between the walls and cabinets with things. Wrap your off-season shoes in old plastic bags and hide them on the top of your wardrobe.



Lunch
Have lunch in the way exactly as how you have lunch back in your home town. If it is too difficult to find the same scene, fake one with cardboard or whatever.



Anecdote
Call your family and chat about their beliefs and ideologies. Chat about what exactly happened that makes them believe so. Chat until you heard an extremely funny story that contradicts everything they just said. Make a monument for this story.


Nostalgia
Recollect activities you enjoyed a lot in the past but never do them again since the migration. Do it here in your new resident place. Overcome all the difficulties. If it is being perceived as inappropriate by the locals, ignore them.


Recipe
- Cook a daily dish you had before, make sure all the ingredients are wrong. Replace them with the most common ingredients from your local market.
- Cook a famous local dish, make sure all the ingredients are wrong. Replace them with the ingredients from your hometown.

Pagan festival: a festival of normalities

Are we all modern-day pagans that constantly examined
by the sacred modern(Eurocentric)-life?

By confronting the "normalities" from different places and cultures, the project aim to explores the abnormal nature of "normality" and questions the culture dominance under modernity/convention/daily in the globalization context.

As a Chinese that lives in the Netherlands, the project is based on my personal experience in my homeland and my resident city. I experimented over and over: the confrontation between two "normals". From different starting points of everyday contexts, the work eventually forms a diverse and unclassifiable archive: wandering through various media such as video/performance/experimentation/sculpture. I call this undirected act a "festival of normalities". It ultimately becomes an occasion to celebrate those who are not in their hometown, those who are known as migrant and foreigners.