Journey to the Elsewhere

How would we reorient ourselves in the post-globalization world — a world looking to return home, but no longer a home to return, a heimatlos world？

Renxing Zhou & You He
Journey to the Elsewhere
2025, interactive video installation UV printed tablecloth and napkin, plastic Chinakohl, wooden round table, archives

As the Covid-19 pandemic announced the end of the first phase of globalization after the Cold War, it also left many abandoned spaces like a void in the city. During a walk along the Rhein near Bonn, we run into a space as such, an abandoned 3-story-Chinese restaurant, where we discovered a rich material of the archives including documents, letters, images spanning more than 30 years covers a historical period of the opening up of China in the early 90s till the hard lock down due to the pandemic, which provides a slice of perspective of globalization through the lens of Chinese immigrants in Germany. The building itself not only served as a Chinese restaurant but also functions as a community center, including a language school and a business company. From the left documents, we can roughly tell it shut down during the pandemic, the archival materials from faxed love letters to restaurant design plans reveal the entangled threads between personal stories and historical moments. The 30 years of ever-growing interactions in-between the continents till an abrupt shutdown were preserved as an archeological layer of collective memory.

In this video game, we set the restaurant we found on a ghost cargo ship that carries loads of containers and travels across the continents. With the integration of 3d scans of spaces and the findings of different memorial artefacts, we turn the game into a spatial archive, allowing players to grow and explore through the perspective of moss, while the moss gradually covers the room along with its path. During this process, the boundary between human and non-human is blurred.

Outside the screen in the exhibition space, we hang the tablecloths and handkerchiefs we collect from the laundry room of the place. The artifacts, including handwritings, documents, restaurant plans, and UV islands from 3D scans, serve as carriers of memory and invite viewers to observe them closely beyond the game.

Sound Design:
Helin Sezen Korkmarz

Technical Support:
Shipeng Ouyang

Software:
Unreal Engine & Blender

Special thanks:
Shuree Sarantuya
Nathan Schönewolf
Lilian Haberer