Suspicious Stain | 可疑污点
"Suspicious Stain" is a performance that traces the bodily histories of women who grew up in China and are now based in various European countries, including Finland and Germany. It reflects on their perpetual flight from suspect identities: as Chinese citizens, women, 'blood packages', costs of rapid development, 'huminerals' (human minerals), patriarchal patches, and colonial fantasies. This work explores the constant diasporic state embodied by these women, focusing on internalized surveillance, bodily colonization, and extractive capitalism's impact on the female body in a post-colonial context.
The work opens a dialogue on embodied shame, fears, and trauma carried by women who kept escaping without nostalgia. It invites both participants and audiences on a journey of escape and disengagement, unfolding through constant hesitation and disorientation.
"Suspicious Stain" is the artistic component of Qiong Zhang's doctoral research project 'Tracing Ghost Hallucinations in a World of Technological Surveillance', with questions of how national identity might be constructed through individual and collective fantasies and imagination? How the concepts of surveillance being imagined and practiced within people’s everyday life ideologically and politically?
Working group:
Direction and dramaturgy: Qiong Zhang
Performance: Christy Ma, Qiong Zhang, Xiaole Wang, Yumo Cheng
Sound design: Johanna Sulalampi
Light design: David Brabec
Costume support: Alena Tereshko
Producer: Nina Numminen
Photography: Jere Aalto
Premiered in November 2024 at Teak Theater, Uniarts Helsinki.
Supported by: Finnish Cultural Foundation, Performing Arts Research Center Tutke in Theater Academy, Uniarts Helsinki.
