LAURA FONG PROSPER

Documentary that follows the search of my roots and the finding of lost relatives in the house where my grandfather was born near Zhongshan, China.

Funded by the Berlin Senate Chancellery for Cultural Affairs 2018.

• To request a viewing link please feel free to contact me.

Dual super8 film projection installation that shows a juxtaposition of two worlds. The tropics denoted by a black and white palm tree. The Nordic, by a colored birch tree.

It is a reflection of my life in two continents, two climates, two cultures, but also two different times: A gray and monochromatic past. A colorful and bright present.

For the piece Inverted Memories (2017), Laura Fong Prosper invited Berlin filmmaker and media artist Christin Wilke to collaborate on a series of video letters. By using personal archival miniDV footage, the artists discuss concepts of home, free choice, and memory.
Each received letter is read in a voice-over and is accompanied by images of daily life moments, landscapes, and random footage collected in the last 10 years. The intimate exchange raises questions about leaving, staying, and going back. Could the exile at the end be- come a home or are we stuck in between?

• To request a viewing link please feel free to contact me.

Missing home, the ocean, the sun, colors and textures. Heimweh (german word for Homesickness) deals with the emotions of life far away from family and the place where I grew up. At the same time, it’s a distant and distorted representation, as if I don’t remember anymore how my life truly was before I left.

Videoperformance, Color, Full HD, 07min42sec, Silent.

It is a collection of .gif files in 'loop' of black and white photos of my family re-placed on different backgrounds in color with textures that remind me of home, sometimes Panama, sometimes Panachina.

Antique Glitch. Old meets new.

Video Installation 6 channel. Loop. Video Installation for the Karl Kutter stage at Fusion Festival 2014 in Lärz, Germany.

Video mapping installation of 22 different videos into 22 photo frames of different sizes.

Images are composed by colours and feelings, shapes and consciousness. Through a crisp selection of videos, I tell a fragmented story; a testimony of my inner search and the tale of two countries.

Video, Video Projection, Video Installation, Mixed Media Video Installation, Projection Mapping, Video Mapping, VJ Performance, Loop.

Video Installation. Multiscreen. 4 channel. Loop. Berlin, Germany.

“Cerrando el Círculo (Closing the Circle)” is a multichannel audiovisual installation representing the closing of the cycle that my grandfather first started by moving from China to Panama back in 1922 and “ended” 90 years later when I went to China in 2012 and found the house where he was born. It consists of a 10 or 12 screen (10 or 12 monitor) display, arranged in the shape of a circle, where the images of each monitor are facing out, and the spectator will walk around the circle facing the monitors.

With this installation I wanted to touch subjects of life, pain, death and identity. Being always a foreigner, even in my hometown, I never felt connected to any place or culture. I was always everything and nothing at the same time. Now, after this experience, I am starting to finally understand who I am and where I come from. I just needed to close this circle to be able to start the next one.

Project partly funded by the Women’s Promotion Fund of the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, 2013.

A lazy Susan is a turntable (rotating tray) placed on a table or countertop to aid in moving food. Lazy Susans may be made from a variety of materials but are usually glass, wood, or plastic. They are usually circular and placed in the center of a circular table to share dishes easily among the diners. Owing to the nature of Chinese cuisine, especially dim sum, they are especially common at formal Chinese restaurants both on the mainland and abroad *.

*taken from Wikipedia.

Back in 2009, three years after my grandfather had died, I reunited with my family in Panama as we usually gathered on a round table to eat chinese food. Playing around I came across with the idea of placing the camera on top of the lazy Susan and just make it go round and round while shooting, without imaging that exactly three years later I was going to be doing the same camera game with an unknown part of my family, this time in China in the place where my dead grandfather was born.

Ting bu dong ( I hear you but i don't understand)

This video piece is a collection of digital images and sounds that can be heard and seen every day in China today. The images were all shot from a window, glass, or an elevator. They reflect my emotions in China, where there is always a barrier between me and the environment. I see but I do not belong. 

The locations are Shanghai, Beijing, Xi'an, and roads in the province of Gansu in the direction of Tianshui, Lanzhou and Xiahe.

In collaboration with Jan Philip Müller. Datamoshing Media Art experiments using macroblocks and motion vectors.

A censored video performance on being censored and censorship.

7 min 5 sec, silent

Video Performance in Fulldome Format for Planetarium. Video Performance. Exhibited in the Fulldome International Festival in Jena, Germany in 2011 and in the International Festival of Digital Culture 2011 in the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio).

It is a recreation of an aquarium where the only animal that lives inside the fish tank is a human being. In this case, myself, representing different kinds of marine animals. The film could be seen as activism for animal rights. I think aesthetically, fish tanks and aquariums look very pretty. But the trapped fish and marine mammals look so sad in there, not to mention the cruelty of the way they’re treated. Why do we go to aquariums to see animals forced to swim around us and do tricks just to entertain us, if we can portray humans instead?

No animals were harmed during the creation of this film.