Jesse Chun

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O dust 
2023
7 mins 27 seconds, with sound, Korean, English, French, single-channel; three-channel for installation 


O dust uncovers intimate reflections on language, memory, and the intangible​ through decentering the Eurocentric translation and historiography of cultural inheritance. Filmed at the Intangible Heritage archives and conference rooms of UNESCO headquarters in Paris, FR - where the world's heritages are institutionalized through English and French only - from such site, Chun makes an intimate speech – an abstract letter to her late grandmother, who was an unhistoricized Korean folk dancer. The film speaks through layers of linguistic and visual ruptures that evade the historic, bureaucratic narrative; it speaks through the gaps. The non-linear film oscillates between various forms of storytelling: an abstract letter, an imaginary multilingual folklore, and moving image poetry. O dust summons the untranslatable and the intangible to meditate on inherited lyrics​ and their afterlife​ -- on what continues to get carried across tongues, place​, and time.