Lei Lei + Thomas Sauvin Recycled

The video Recycled is made up of 3,000 photographs selected from almost half a million negatives collected on the outskirts of Beijing.

Lei Lei continues to develop the principle of the hyperpalimpsest that is typical of many Chinese artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from one of the main representatives of the “sixth wave” of Chinese cinema Jia Zhangke (Still Life) to the remarkable documentary maker Wang Bing (Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks). This approach enables the artist to splice similar materials (a common technique in classical video essays) and to capture the changes in the same locations over time. It also allows the viewer to observe the past beneath a thin layer of the present. The slogans and gestures, clothing and faces, rituals and technologies of past decades may seem to have disappeared, but their outlines can be clearly seen in the surrounding space, appearing through each other in the same way that you can see someone’s story in an eroded film.

The overlaying of photographs in Recycled creates an almost stroboscopic effect, pointing the way to a newly dynamic screen and another geometry of cinema, freed of its usual boundaries.