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 reflects 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 Jeong Gak Haeng, who was an unhistoricized Korean folk dancer. The film speaks through layers of linguistic and visual ruptures that evade the historic, bureaucratic narrative. Aurally narrated by Chun and C.Edelmann, the French translator at UNESCO, the film questions and constellates the gaps, interconnection, and interiority that cannot be contained. 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.