Sidi Chen

Burnaby, Canada

Sidi Chen (b. 1992, Quanzhou, China) is a diasporic queer artist whose interdisciplinary practice addresses the relational shifts at the intersections of the body, communities, and ecologies. Sidi Chen engages with the embodied experience and models from traditional knowledge and natural science as creative vehicles to conduct projects as relational mediation and attunement for the more-than-human agencies, through which, Chen searches catalysts that lead towards queer futures.

Collaborating with Aryo Khakpour

Vancouver, Canada

PERFORMANCE

Tidal Locking

Tidal Locking is an interdisciplinary research project that bridges planetary science and relational aesthetics through performance. I take inspirations from the planetary orbital movements in the process of tidal locking where two astronomical bodies pull through the gravitational gradient and change the rotations around each other. Through the process of tidal locking, those two astronomical bodies gradually reach a balance and always face one another with the same side. Such as the Moon is tidally locked to Earth, and we only see one side of the Moon.

Through this project, I want to explore and examine how the body can mediate tensions and mobilize the boundaries in human relations. The collaborative nature of the project not only resides on the fact that it needs at least two people to form a star system but also lives through the duality of the negotiation, where one’s movement is both the result and resource of another body’s movement. Such a duality is also shown through the post-performance photo documentation where the performance imprinted bodies through the rope with marks – while the tension could be aggressive, it could also be negotiated with care.