2024ADAM-Kitchen: Sticky Hands, Stitched Mountains

Date/Time: Wednesday, 28 August 2024, 17:00-18:00
Venue: 11F Studio 3, Taipei Performing Arts Center
Artist: Nanako Matsumoto, Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos)
QA Moderator: Juliet Knapp / Co-director of Kyoto Experiment
Language: In English (QA)

Sticky Hands, Stitched Mountains

The perception of ‘Deep in the mountains’ has often been depicted as places inhabited by marginalized and unknown beings. In Japanese folklore, ‘Yamamba’ is a specter in the form of an old woman living in the mountains. In the Taiwanese Indigenous Atayal oral story, a community of queer women live in the deep mountain place called ‘Temahahoi’. What if these mountains were connected across and beyond the border, where ‘Yamamba’ and ‘Temahahoi’ people met? 

Sticky Hands, Stitched Mountains is the first collaborative project by Nanako Matsumoto, a Tokyo-based dance artist and a member of team chiipro, and a Taipei & Naarm-based Visual artist Anchi Lin (Atayal name: Ciwas Tahos), who creates performative video installation work. Continuing the encounter at the 2023 ADAM Artist Lab, they have started the collaboration from the research field trips in Kyoto and Taipei this year. Nanako’s ‘Yokai Body’ methodology constructs texts and choreographies based on research, and Ciwas explores her cultural and gender identity through her queer lens. Both artists conduct in-depth research to create a transnational mountain in a theater. In what words will their bodies speak out?

This work-in-progress presentation at the 2024 ADAM Gathering will be performed by Nanako Matsumoto on-site, integrated with video created by Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos). The world premiere will be on 12 to 14 October at the Kyoto Experiment 2024.

*Co-production: Taipei Performing Arts Center, Kyoto Experiment, The Japan Foundation

Nanako Matsumoto (Japan, Tokyo)

Born in 1992 in Osaka, Nanako Matsumoto is a dance artist who works with performance and language-separately and in various combinations. She is interested in dance as a critique of the body. Her interdisciplinary practice also includes writings and public action. She has been focused on the creation of dance works as a performance unit team chiipro and has presented two works at Kyoto Experiment 2021 Autumn and Kyoto Experiment 2022. One of the characteristics of their works is the use of text based on meticulous research. In writing texts and making performances, Nanako deals with the intersection of the historical, societal, anthropological, and geographical contexts as well as her physical sensations and memories with her own body. Recent years, she seeks for ‘Yokai Body’, a state of transformation achieved by layering multiple images onto the body. She is an artist of the Saison Foundation ‘Saison Fellow I’ from 2023-2024.

Recent works: 

Imperial Palace Runningman (2020, Labo20#22)

Kyoto Imaginary Waltz (2021, Kyoto Experiment 2021 Autumn)

Menstruation Sumo Dance (2022, Kyoto Experiment 2022)

Website: chiipro.net

Photo (c) Shingo 

Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) (Taiwan, Taipei & Naarm (Melbourne))

Anchi Lin, Atayal name is Ciwas Tahos, based between Taipei Taiwan, and Naarm (Melbourne) Australia, new media and performance artist of Atayal/ Itaṟal and Taiwanese Hō-ló descent. Ciwas's body-centered practice weaves the Indigenous Atayal worldview through performance, moving images, cyberspace, ceramics, and kinetic installation to claim a self-determined queer space, her work is an exploration of cultural and gender identity, using her body as a medium to trace linguistic and cultural experiences of displacement to seek out new forms of understanding. Ciwas’s most notable art project is mgluw tuqiy na Temahahoi (Finding Pathways to Temahahoi).

Most recently, Ciwas was awarded the Biannual Prize of Pulima Art Award and was selected as the inaugural Artist for the Australia-Taiwan Friendship Year Arts Exchange Partnership for 2023. In 2023, their work was exhibited at the 2023 Arts Electronica Festival in Austria, the Taiwan Austronesian Art Triennial in Taiwan, and Proto-zone13 at Shedhalle in Switzerland. 

Ciwas completed an MFA in New Media Art at Taipei National University of the Arts (Taiwan) and BFA in Visual Art at Simon Fraser University (Canada).

Website: https://anchilin.ca/

Photo (c) Julia Lin Kingham