Memoir of a Snail in Green Water is an experimental film that appears as part of an installation. The work takes the form of a fragmented memoir told from the perspective of a golden apple snail, who moves slowly through water and pieces of childhood.
Project Video
Abstract
The project was first inspired by a dream I had a long time ago. I was walking alone in my old kindergarten, and the bathroom stalls were filled with golden apple snail eggs. Golden apple snails were very common as an invasive species when I was little. As a kid, I was always warned not to touch them, because they might carry disease and needed to be controlled and annihilated. However, the golden apple snail has a very special name in Chinese: fu shou luo, the snail of happiness and longevity, almost ironically. Golden apple snails are born in water. They develop lungs later and emerge from the water to lay eggs. However, they cannot live completely out of water for long, as their skin dries out. I began to relate the life of a golden apple snail to a kind of childhood that I, and many Chinese millennials and Gen Z, might have experienced. It is a childhood blessed with hope, but confined in reality. We grow up surrounded by rapidly changing concrete structures, struggling to break free from a suppressive social and, especially, educational system. But what happens after we are free? We grow up. We keep returning to earlier days in our dreams, yet we are also afraid of time reversing. We are stuck in this dilemma, hating what once surrounded us but also missing that youth. The project was also inspired by the internet art form dreamcore. Through this work, I try to gather these feelings and extract the complex emotions people have toward dreamcore images, while celebrating and remembering my childhood.
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