Watching: Caspiar

Overview

In 1998, the island of Caspiar sinks, forcing all its inhabitants to flee and become refugees in places such as Hong Kong. Su’s fictional story about one such refugee unfolds through a seemingly stoic interview. The interviewee – a French-speaking white man – works as a domestic worker, a role that subverts colonial expectations of the white expatriate living in Hong Kong. The video concludes with a quotation from the famous “madeleine” passage in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, foregrounding the centrality of memory and recollection in the reimagination of places, identities and histories.