Take Me to the Sea 

2024
Projection Assets, Direction, Video & Music production by Arete Xu
Choreographed and Performed by Jessica Zhang
Made with Touch Designer, Madmapper, Adobe Premiere, Logic Pro

Take Me to the Sea started as a retroactive reflection of a song I wrote when I first moved to New Zealand. I always had the desire to treat the ocean as a singular graspable thing, to make it tangible, an object to be held. The ocean, for all its murky boundless depths, is too often a site synonymous with boundary, territory, and displacement.  I wished it were a single relentless thread, an akin sight I’d share with someone else who stood where I once did. In this project, I wanted the body to act as a site and to trace the topographies of the ocean upon it, to weigh the body down with it, and to send a message in a bottle to the ocean itself.