喬麗歌 Qiao Lige（中國｜CN）

我希望此次駐留項目可以呼應重慶獨特的地理景觀，並與其多樣的公共交通系統相連接。我之前來重慶旅遊時發現這座城市的交通系統非常神奇，尤其是軌道系統，即便悉尼的軌道系統也很發達，但是乘坐體驗遠不如重慶詩意。重慶的景觀豐富多樣，公共交通工具也同樣如此。我記得某次乘坐輕軌過江，腳下的江水被重慶的霧氣籠罩，過江橋樑上車輛來了又走，感覺時間的流動變得很飄渺很短暫，但同時又令人難以忽視。我以前去重慶都是作為遊客，對我和同行的朋友來說，重慶特殊的交通系統便成為了景觀的一部分，意味著這種對於本地人來說的日常在其他語境下（也就是外人來重慶遊玩）變得特殊，甚至是稀少。乘坐公共交通從一種普通的出行方式變成了一種可以不被忽略的、有觀賞和美學價值的體驗，這件事本身讓我覺得很神奇。

在我2023年的影像作品《Gift》中，我融入了我姥姥，我母親和我在不同空間的日常通勤方式，以此隱喻我母系家族一生中不斷地遷徙，更確切地說是一種長久的移動的經歷。如果說得深一點，我認為所謂的“通勤”是一種更具體、更顯形的移動和遷徙形式。我成年後基本都生活在所謂的澳大利亞，在藝術學院上學要讀很多後殖民理論和離散文學，其中很多都在反思自身的位置，以及自身和地點的關係，比如澳大利亞對原住民的殖民，以及原住民們如何被迫遠離自己的家和土地（ancestral land）。在我的創作中“移動”是一種非常個人化的東西，它可以代表一種離開也可以代表一種到來。作為一個遠離家鄉的人，我持續不斷地移動著，比如回家、回悉尼、回老家（我姥姥的故鄉嵐縣），我覺得這種移動和通勤很相似。在這些旅程中，我搭乘交通工具這件事意味著接近“目的地”，這是一個我們通常比實際的旅程本身更看重的地點。乘坐交通就像窺視不久的將來，包含著一種不確定性，這也是我喜歡乘坐公共交通工具的另一個原因。

雖然交通並不算是我作品裏一個新的元素，比如上面提到的Gift，還有我的三聯畫《我，父親，白樺林》中的綠皮火車（2022年），但是直到今年，我才逐漸意識到我的創作和交通之間的關係。可能是因為交通作為一種日常行為太過於普遍，以至於忽略它的意趣變成了一種常態。當這種潛意識的關聯逐漸顯形，很多我在創作過程中看似自發的選擇都有了原因。

I envision the work for this residency to be a project that responds to the unique landscape of Chongqing, and connects to its dynamic public transportation system. I’ve visited Chongqing for a few times before and find the city’s transportation system to be quite fascinating, especially the railway system. Chongqing’s landscape is so diverse, as is the means of public transport. I remember riding the metro/subway/轻轨 across the river and seeing the water camouflaged by the smoke-like Chongqing fog; passing by the cross-river bridges that had endless vehicles from two sides of the shores, it was mesmerising.

In my 2023 video work Gift, I included different ways of daily commuting to metaphorically represent the migrating – more holistically saying moving – experiences throughout my matrilineal family’s life. In other words, I think of commuting as a more tangible and physical form of moving and migrating. I spent most of my adult life in so-called Australia; I am conditioned to this Western mode of diasporic narratives, and these fixtures of being (seen as) in diaspora led me to think about the locality of sites. Movement is a very personal stance for me when making art. As a person who semi-deliberately displaces themself, the almost continuous movement – travelling back home, travelling back to Sydney, travelling back to 老家Laojia (my grandmum’s hometown) – shares similarities with the form of commuting. In these journeys, being in transport insinuates being close to the ‘destination’ – a site we usually value more than the actual journey of being in transport. To use transportation is like peeking into the near future; the uncertainty in this process is another reason why I am drawn to transport.

When I’m in transport to somewhere, time somehow stops – or to say, pauses – because the ‘destination’ seems to be where time starts moving again. The static temporality that we as passengers experience when being in a machinery, in a mechanical composition of movement, becomes non-existing. I am interested in this often overlooked pause. The pause here is more than a pause of time, it is also a disrupture of the established spatial relations within the transport. The means of the transport thus is converted to an othered space. However, once a tool of transportation is manufactured; it occupies space innately. A concept given by Foucault, heterotopia, aligns with this deeply juxtaposed configuration of transport. I directly quote him here: “The heterotopis begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.”[Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias.,” accessed September 27, 2025, https://foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en/.]

How Chongqing’s railway system is advertised as a tourism attraction is also something I hope to investigate. One example I can think of is 李子坝Liziba (and the related career paths emerged from its craze online). I would like to document and explore the public transportation within/to Huangjueping through various lens-based approaches.