Introduction
When personal experience is continuously recorded, preserved, and transmitted, the archive gradually shifts from a private gesture into a global structure, reproducing the same conditions. Across different cultural contexts and historical periods, questions such as work, family, the body, the future, and being observed repeatedly re-emerge: they do not derive only from individual destiny, but are produced, fixed, and perpetuated by similar linguistic habits and visual mechanisms. The private archive is no longer merely the memory of a single person; it moves toward a form of collective memory, questioning and blurring the boundaries between private and public, individual and history. The materials of the work come from two paths: in Europe, I collected more than one hundred obsolete CCD cameras and camcorders, together with more than ten VHS tapes; in China, I collected more than ten personal diaries belonging to different individuals. For me, they are all deeply private objects: the diaries were written for oneself, and family recordings were mostly intended only for family members. Their way of recording is fragile and fragmentary, but precisely for this reason closer to how people actually lived at that moment. In the editing, I did not use the diaries as voice-over narration to explain the images, nor did I try to match a sentence to a specific family. Instead, I placed the two sets of materials in the same space and allowed them to come into contact: sometimes they approach each other, sometimes they diverge. The aim is to allow the viewer to perceive the emotion of the writing and, at the same time, to be guided by details within the images, slowly generating a sense of overlap without perfect coincidence. In the film, every sentence from the diaries seems like something already heard: it comes from a concrete past, but also appears as a future we will continue to encounter. I gradually brought the image back to a single blue, a light similar to being underwater. This blue softens the direct expression of emotion and shifts the gaze from event to sensation, from the stories of others to an inner echo. It is not a decorative choice, but a way of allowing memory to sediment and emotion to cool: when emotion is suspended, we can see more clearly how structures act upon life and, at the same time, return to ourselves.
