Regrounding Bonds

Regrounding Bonds is a community storytelling project exploring the distinctive identities woven by the houses and residents of the Schilderswijk in The Hague. By connecting the diverse residents and their everyday lives through personal narratives, the project sheds light on the interconnected identities shaped through nuanced interactions and interventions with their houses, challenging the conventional perception of Schilderswijk as an economically and materially challenged area. Through a video installation, the project aims to create an archive of memories, emotions, and experiences that transfer from one house to another under the urban forces, which brings residents' stories to life, highlighting how residents’ stories transcend the well-trodden narrative, empowering storytellers and audience alike by creating connections to the houses they live in.

Shouyi He is a moving-image-based artist and researcher. His work interrogates interpersonal relationships and their dynamics in social apparatuses, such as the power dynamics within the family, the autonomy in kinship, the gender nuances in households, and the notion of identity in various cultural contexts. Taking personal narratives as a starting point, he looks into how individual agency varies across various interpersonal relationships, mainly familial ones. By weaving personal narratives and multidimensional visual languages, he aims to question the established norms of interpersonal relationships involved in our day-to-day, and deconstruct general narratives. In the forms of video and installation, his work connects the speculation on relationship dynamics provoked by a fusion of investigation, research, dismantling, and reconstruction with the reality where people live, thus sparking a broader social dialogue.