Speaking to Nobody is an artistic research and practice project initiated by Changli Luo in 2023. In this project, Changli collaborates with her mother to create a fictional figure named “Changli Cui”—“Cui” is her mother’s family name—based on their family archive and shared imagination. Through moving image, writing, body, and ritual, they weave together a Sci-Fi of the matriarchal society. By inhabiting this fictional identity, they seek to explore a way of embodied, nonlinear knowledge production that transcends patriarchal narratives.

This self-publication brings together six letters written to the fictional figure Changli Cui. These letters wander between imagination and reality, crossing the boundaries of time, geography, and physicality—within them intertwine monologues, summons, emotions, dreams, memories, conversations with others, and self-reflections. At the same time, these letters open invitations to others—they respond to the question “how to tell the stories that cannot be told but are impossible to tell,” carrying those female memories never written in official archives or in the male-centric histories of ethnic minorities. They also invite different voices and people into this journey of conversation and exploration.

In this process, varied knowledges and stories, different voices and people, are no longer fleeting names or cold academic footnotes, but become participants, co-builders and witnesses of a collective firepit space centered around matriarchal principles.

This publication was shortlisted for the 2025 Page Not Found Thesis Award.