Uyghurs of East Turkestan
09.08.2024
The story follows the arc of our growing awareness of a police state and settler colonialism as I move through the region as a curious traveler, evolving from a position of a cultural tourist’s naivety to that of concerned Sino-diasporic artists.
The project includes, but is not limited to, a short experimental documentary film, multi-channel video installation, a series of mixed-media works, and a zine featuring Uyghur artists and poets. In addition to the footage we shot in 2017, source material includes news, social media videos, leaked camp footage, interviews with scholars and activists, travel documents, tourism advertisements, state propaganda, and tourists’ videos.
China brands the Belt and Road Initiative global infrastructure project as a future of shared prosperity and inclusivity for Central Asia. What we filmed on the train journey from Europe to Beijing contradicts the misleading images of the “China Dream.” The evidence of omnipresent AI surveillance, military occupation, land rights violations, erasure of ethnic and religious people, and forced labor to serve China’s expansion, aspects we were shocked to witness on our first and last trip in 2017. The significance of 2017 is that it was when “re-education camps” were being built and Uyghurs started to disappear in large numbers. In East Turkestan, also known as Xinjiang in China, one of the three “autonomous regions” the Communist Party annexed in 1949 (alongside Tibet and Inner Mongolia), domestic tourism is booming. Meanwhile, over 1 million indigenous Uyghurs are arbitrarily detained and tortured in re-education camps, forced to work in labor camps, and children taken away to state orphanages.
China brands the Belt and Road Initiative global infrastructure project as a future of shared prosperity and inclusivity for Central Asia. What we filmed on the train journey from Europe to Beijing contradicts the misleading images of the “China Dream.” The evidence of omnipresent AI surveillance, military occupation, land rights violations, erasure of ethnic and religious people, and forced labor to serve China’s expansion, aspects we were shocked to witness on our first and last trip in 2017. The significance of 2017 is that it was when “re-education camps” were being built and Uyghurs started to disappear in large numbers. In East Turkestan, also known as Xinjiang in China, one of the three “autonomous regions” the Communist Party annexed in 1949 (alongside Tibet and Inner Mongolia), domestic tourism is booming. Meanwhile, over 1 million indigenous Uyghurs are arbitrarily detained and tortured in re-education camps, forced to work in labor camps, and children taken away to state orphanages.
Uyghurs live in fear but must act like everything is OK as the smallest act of resistance is punished. We documented what it’s like traveling under surveillance and the dissonance of Uyghurs’ “cultural performances” for tourists.
The irony of visiting ancient ruins in a place where the government is actively destroying Uyghur landmarks, homes, and culture as a ruin-in-progress is emphasized. Throughout the journey, we interlace our introspective observations into these images through the voice-over and with subtitles, slowly realizing the ways we are complicit in the global silence on their genocide.
This project takes an autoethnography approach - a hybrid of autobiography and ethnography using personal narrative as the center of analysis. It acknowledges our position as an outsider and surveys how we view other cultures in relation to ourselves.
Formally, the work offers an anti-imperial vision of the paradigms of representing the “other.” A lyrical introspection and poetic observation on how we view other cultures in relation to ourselves, it critiques documentary traditions and challenges our visual literacy in our current state of media censorship and propaganda.
The irony of visiting ancient ruins in a place where the government is actively destroying Uyghur landmarks, homes, and culture as a ruin-in-progress is emphasized. Throughout the journey, we interlace our introspective observations into these images through the voice-over and with subtitles, slowly realizing the ways we are complicit in the global silence on their genocide.
This project takes an autoethnography approach - a hybrid of autobiography and ethnography using personal narrative as the center of analysis. It acknowledges our position as an outsider and surveys how we view other cultures in relation to ourselves.
Formally, the work offers an anti-imperial vision of the paradigms of representing the “other.” A lyrical introspection and poetic observation on how we view other cultures in relation to ourselves, it critiques documentary traditions and challenges our visual literacy in our current state of media censorship and propaganda.
