VIDEO
FLUENCY, 2019
Stop Motion Animation
7:57 min
BRIC Media Arts Fellowship
Presented in the style of a visual language learning device. I used contrasting voices to create confusion when text and pronounced words are rendered. I reference the languages spoken at my home in Ecuador (Spanish, Chinese and English) to express the humorous, entangled and chaotic linguistic situation in which I grew up.
Born in Ecuador to Chinese parents, I reflect on my own experience with language learning, language acquisition and language loss. Spanish being my mother tongue, I learned Cantonese when living in Macau from age 10 to 15, while also learning to speak Hakka at home with my grandmother. Upon returning to Ecuador at age 15, I was enrolled in an American high school where I had to learn English and had to recover my long forgotten Spanish outside of school. Throughout my lifetime I have been fluent in Spanish, Cantonese, Hakka and English, though not fluent at all these languages at the same time. Lately I’ve been watching movies from Hong Kong to recover my Cantonese.