Pujita Guha is a Ph.D student at the Film and Media Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara.She also runs the artistic, and indisciplinary research platform, Forest Curriculum along with Abhijan Toto. Her curatorial, artistic, and academic interests include thinking about forests & frontiers, cinema and media, infrastructures, south & southeast Asia. She has published in Cineaste, NANG, IIC Quarterly, Art Critique of Taiwan, South Asian History and Culture, among others. In her M.Phil from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi she looked at the anthropocenic aesthetics in the films of Lav Diaz, and she has presented her work in ARKIPEL, SEM/ALAM Art Lab, Hanoi Doc Lab, Cornell University and at other academic conferences.
This paper argues that Cheng Xinhao’s intermedial project, Strange Terrains (2013-Present), offers a non-civilizational account of the Mangs: the unrecognized ethnic nomadic community moving between the hilly borders of Yunnan (Southwest China) and Lai Châu (Vietnam). Strange Terrains comprises of three artistic streams – (i) ‘Hunting: A Contemporary Knowledge Form’ (a photographic, infra-red imaging, and multi-channel video installation that documents the hunting practices of the contemporary Mang) (ii) ‘The production of Borderlands’ (photographs videos, counter maps, installations, etc. which look at how the Mang’s cross the China-Vietnam border on an everyday, lived basis), and (iii) ‘Silver…. And Other Elements’ (scrapbook installations, photo and video work that look at the incursions of silver and other extractive capitalism regimes into the mountain borderlands, in the process colonizing the Mangs.) Cheng’s work illustrates what I define as noncivilizational media: the lived experiences, habits, crafts – in a word, technicities – of ethnic or minority communities, the “noncivilized” of the Zomian region. Strange Terrains, I argue, is not only set in the Zomian region – a mountain-forest shatter zone spanning East, South, and Southeast Asia (Schendel 2002, Scott 2009) that the Mangs inhabit, but also follows the Zomian noncivilizational ethic. It documents their everyday practices of hunting (as opposed to settled irrigated farmland), evasion of extractive industries (for nomadic livelihoods), and a casual irreverence for national boundaries that the Mangs use to hold the forces of state, civilizational progress, and capital at bay. Further, I maintain that Cheng’s work not only documents noncivilized lives, but, as a Han Chinese closely working with the Mangs, he also imbues a noncivilizational aesthetic and ethic in his ethnographic practice. I focus on his video I Want to Make a Film (2017), where he primarily records the everyday methods of building a fire, hunting, making thatched roofs in the forests, etc. which is a standard, colonial ethnographic practice. However, he interjects these scenes with wry, humorous intertitles during his dialogues with Mang collaborators, focusing on how ethnographic appearances are also labor (requiring repeated performances of hunting or building huts across rugged terrains). He also films their complaints and final refusal to film (any further) in the night. I conclude that Cheng’s work proposes a noncivilizational media practice in a dual sense: both as the documentation of noncivilized lives, and as a decolonizing ethnographic practice which incorporates the Mang’s presence and consequent refusal to be filmic subjects.