FORMAT

Film, 13 mins

ARTIST

April Lin 林森

~ Here; come, restore, replenish, relax. Crafting a better world is not an easy adventure. Rest with me. ~

An experimental documentary exploring the meanings of rest: political, spiritual, tied to labour, associated with guilt. The film is Chapter R of April Lin’s long-term project, “An A-Z of Imagining A Better World”, and serves as a reminder of rest as a structurally-negated necessity, a muscle worth training, and an essential strategy in the process toward liberation for all.


Conceptualised and developed while at Supernormal Residency, the piece draws from the location of the intentional community of Braziers Park, inviting the viewer in for a moment of respite, wherever they may be.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

April Lin 林森 (b. 1996, Stockholm — they/them) is an artist-filmmaker investigating image-making as a site for the construction, sustenance, and dissemination of co-existent yet conflicting truths. They dream & explore & critique & fret & catastrophise & imagine & play with the potentials that the moving image holds — for a collective remembering of forgotten pasts, for a critical examining of normalised presents, and for a visualising of freer futures as, of course, imagined from the periphery.

April Lin 林森 uses video as a self-reflexive and cathartic tool, interweaving strands of auto-biography, world-building, documentary, performance, and the post-Internet, topped off with an inevitable garnish consisting of the other matters dialoguing with their brain and heart during the making process of each piece. Uniting their genre-fluid body of work is a commitment to centring oppressed knowledges, building an ethics of collaboration around reciprocal care, and exploring the linkages between history, memory, and interpersonal and structural trauma.

Their films have been shown and screened at, including but not limited to: the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, HOME, Royal Art Institute of Sweden, LA Filmforum, MADATAC, Botkyrka Konsthall, Arebyte Gallery, Konstfack, Camden Arts Centre, Beijing International Short Film Festival, Tunis International Feminist Art Festival, Floating Projects, Underwire Festival, Chinese Arts Now, Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, and 4:3 Boiler Room.