2026.05.23 Saturday 15:00
Location
Fotografiska, No.127 Guangfu Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai
Speaker：Ag
How many possibilities does it take to create one impossibility?
Xishuangbanna, a tropical enclave. I realized this through a single rubber tree — and not merely in a geographical sense, but also in the constant trajectories of human activity. Are we not also trees? Mountains? Rivers? Land that rises and falls? We speak unspeakable stories, in words or in silence. A web of cause and effect, a web of tenderness and brutality. Or do we come to understand a simple truth about ecosystems through exchange and selfgiving: we are inseparable.
A collection of stories that seem distant yet forever entangled — a circulating journey of embodied landscapes and conscious atmosphere.
Ag is a filmmaker and writer. She is the author of short story collections Notes on Shanghai Geography, Deep Simulator, A Traveler’s Desire. She engages in cross‑boundary practice across film, literature and contemporary art. Shanghai Daughter is her debut film, it was selected for Panorama program in the 76th Berlinale, the 50th Hong Kong International Film Festival Young Cinema Competition (Chinese Language).
VORTEX, launched by the MACA in Shanghai in 2022, is an art and cultural salon in the form of lecture performances occurring once or twice every month. The programme calls for non-institutionalised artistic and academic production in which contemporary art practitioners and scholars get to explore cross-disciplinarily the issues of the macro or micro, the global or local, the collective or individual. VORTEX, hence, is where you spin in the whirlpool of spontaneous whims and intuitive approaches represented by individual research and enquiries. Being present here at VORTEX, you are experiencing versatile forms of lecture performances that experiment with new mechanisms and methodologies.
