Tongues of Fire

tongues of fire
single-channel (3 scroll) video, with sound, mirrors
outdoor installation view, 2023

tongues of fire
2022-23,
1 min 9 seconds excerpt, full length 6:00 mins, with sound

tongues of fire
installation view, 2023

Tongues of Fire
commissioned by Ballroom Marfa, 2023
6:00 mins, with sound, English, Spanish, Korean

Decentering the cinematic tropes of the Western, particularly the American iconographies of the desert and the horizon, this moving image poem speaks through fragmentation, abstraction, and the non-verbal, probing what is buried underneath these landscapes and their histories. Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa, the film speaks through moving image performance, shamanic transmission, soundscape, and concrete poetry, in response to a haunting American linguistic history that is buried in Marfa's deserts. In 1954, at a formerly segregated school called the Blackwell School in Marfa, a teacher coerced the hispanic immigrant students to physically bury their mother tongue into the soil, to ban them from speaking in Spanish. In 2007, the Blackwell’s former students gathered to collectively unbury their language in a symbolic ceremony toward reclamation and regeneration. Tongues of Fire is inspired by their unearthing. The non-narrative film "speaks nearby" (Trinh T.Minh-ha) through a multilingual linguascape (Spanish, English, and Korean) and the artist’s nocturnal moving image performance in the desert. Drawing from Korean folk ritual of ancestral offering, Chun performs video offerings onto the night desertscape with fleeting images, water, flowers, and mirror. Interweaving fragments of the nocturnal ceremony and footages of the engraved alphabets at the Blackwell School, Tongues of Fire offers a nocturne for the buried and unburied language(s), their diasporas, and passages.

*The title is an homage to and quote from Gloria E.Anzaldúa, from her letter/essay, Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers, 1980