花東新村 Huatung Village

花東新村 Huatung Village

五頻道錄像裝置 five-channel video installation， 7'35 "，2009

音樂製作：Sammy Chien

Music supervisor: Sammy Chien

Huatung Village was once an Amis tribal settlement in Taipei's Xizhi district. In 1984, there were three aboriginal families farming vegetables there. By 1996, it had already become a whole tribal community consisting of 215 families. It was a massive block of illegal buildings. The villagers used sheets of iron, wood, and other materials that they had gathered to build houses and buildings. They also used those materials to build traditional tribal lookouts, community meeting rooms, and churches. In 1997, the government evicted the whole village and moved them to subsidized government housing. Nowadays, if one tries to find the village's original location, one can only see a few ruins left behind. The original Huatung village had no electricity supply. At night, the residents had to light candles for illumination. Because of this, there were many fires in this area. However, the residents set the last great fire as they had already prepared to vacate the area.

The artist invited the previous chieftain of Huatung Village to give a narrative in the Amis language of what had happened there using juxtaposing separate audio and video tracks to reconstruct an already non-existent tribe in a real area. Filming began during the daytime and continued into the night. At the same time, the video's structure changed from documentation to another approach: the artist wanted to constantly blend the layers between the location (documentation) and the scene (narrative) to create something new.

The narrative in this work interweaves three scenes: the first scene was the chieftain's oral history of the already non-existent tribe; the second scene was the filming of the actual site, and the third scene was presented on five LCD TV split screens with marquee subtitles: the exhibition.

花東新村是一個曾經存在於台北汐止的阿美族部落。1984年，最早有三戶原住民在此搭建菜寮，直到1996年，已經形成一個完整的部落，共有兩百一十五戶。這裡是一個巨大的違建，村民利用撿拾來的鐵板木片等材料搭建房屋，甚至利用這些材料搭建了象徵部落傳統的瞭望台、聚會所以及教堂。1997年政府將整個部落強制遷離至鄰近國宅，如今尋訪原址只能看到當初遺留下來的一些殘骸。過去的花東新村沒有任何電力來源，在夜晚，居民只能使用蠟燭來照明，因此過去這個地方曾經發生許多次失火。但最後一次的大火，是居民自己引燃的，因為他們已經準備要離開這個區域。

藝術家邀請過去花東新村的頭目用阿美族語敘述著曾經發生的事件，透過影音敘事的雙軌特質，在一個真實的地區建構一個已不存在的部落。影片拍攝從白天持續至夜晚，同時影像的建構也開始從紀實的手法進入到另一個向度，將真實地方翻轉成為一個敘事場景，重新創造出新的事件。

作品敘事包含三個不同層次的現場，頭目口述已消失的部落為第一個現場；影像拍攝的原址為第二現場；以及最終透過五個液晶電視以及跑馬燈字幕所呈現的第三層次：藝術現場。