Solveig Qu Suess - Rhythms of the Energetic: Scale, Connection, Disappearance

The live video essay moves through infrastructures of seeing and sensing to reflect on how energetic modernity shapes perception and relation. Moving from China’s reform-era optical transfers to Southeast Asia’s sustainable transitions along the Mekong River, and into the underbellies of contemporary communication systems, it draws on filmmaking, archival work, and field research to explore how image, labor, and desire form the politics of connection. 

Attuned to rhythms and intervals, the practice attends to what remains unrecorded, non-disclosed, or half-remembered– the residues that continue to hum beneath technological systems. It considers the aesthetic and perceptual questions that emerge within systems under transition, asking how shifting geographies and scales transform what can be sensed, represented, and felt. In tracing these movements, it reflects on how we might navigate the monstrous, the uncertain, and the overlapping temporalities of our present through new cultural strategies.

Solveig Qu Suess is an artist and researcher working across documentary cinema, installation, and writing. Her practice moves through the intervals of systemic change, tracing how power and technology shape collective and intimate experiences of time and space. Moving between planetary systems and private archives, her work draws out the relations between infrastructural and emotional landscapes. Her films and installations have been presented internationally at institutions and festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Onassis Stegi (Athens), the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Jameel Arts Centre (Dubai), ZKM (Karlsruhe), the Guangzhou Image Triennial, the Göteborg Biennial, and Kunsthall Trondheim, among others.

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