Wu Tsang - Moby Dick

“Unmissable” and “an eye-opener” were the headlines used in Variety to describe Wildness, the debut 2012 film from director and performance artist Wu Tsang. As a permanent in-house artist at Schauspielhaus Zürich and encircled by her own collective Moved by the Motion, she makes films, installations and performances. In 2020 a retrospective of her work was exhibited at Fondation Lafayette in Paris. Wu Tsang digs up hidden histories, in search of stories about marginalised groups such as migrants or the LGBTQIA+ community. She radically calls into question the relationship between her subject and the viewer, by constantly adding a performative element to her work. For her latest creation, Moby Dick, that element is pretty special: a live string orchestra, BRYGGEN. Based on the eponymous book by Herman Melville, Tsang makes a silent film that harnesses the latest virtual technologies. DJ Asma Maroof and composer Caroline Shaw take care of the music. The original story is robustly reworked. Tsang looks at the wider context of the journey that Moby Dick undertook; this was the period of the international slave trade, the beginning of modern capitalism, and there was great unrest. Tsang rewrites the story from a post-colonial point of view.