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 and abstraction, probing what is buried underneath these landscapes and their histories. Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa, the film draws from Marfa’s Blackwell School – a fragment of haunting American linguistic history – where a historically segregated school for immigrant children forced a burial ceremony of the students’ non-English mother tongues, coercing the students to physically bury their language into the soil. Decades later, the Blackwell’s former youths gathered to collectively unbury their language in a symbolic ceremony – summoning their linguistic memories for reclamation and spiritual regeneration. Tongues of Fire is inspired by their unearthing. The non-narrative film speaks through multilingual linguascape (Spanish, English, and Korean), the artist’s nocturnal moving image performance, and shamanic transmission; 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 footage of the Blackwell School, Tongues of Fire offers a nocturne for the buried and unburied language(s) and their diasporas.

*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