Speaking to Nobody (series)，2025

Mixed media, ritual performance

Speaking to Nobody is an ongoing artistic research and practice project initiated by Changli Cui Luo in 2023. Developed together with her mother through family archives and shared imagination, the project centers on the fictional character "Changli Cui", and moves fluidly between reality and fiction. Through multiple media—video, writing, the body, and ritual—it weaves a Sci-Fi of a matriarchal society, while also serving as a passageway for exploring embodied, nonlinear ways of knowing beyond patriarchal structures.

"Cui" is a figure jointly summoned by the artist and her mother, merging the features and memories of three generations of women. She is them—and more than them. Within the dense net of patriarchal and ethnic minority systems, the voices of ethnic minority women are often swallowed into silence. Yet, we know, they endure: in the mountain fog, in the fire’s dying embers, in the whispered stories from mothers to daughters. They move through the fissures of history’s exclusions and the margins of imagination, seeking the remnants of matrilineal tradition in Li society, learning language from matrilineal ancestors, from the land, and from nature.

In this space, the audience is invited into a liminal zone between reality and fiction—where to sit is to participate, and to see is to witness. The "fire pit", a symbol of matrilineal spirit, is reignited, becoming a medium for sharing, connection, and the reconstruction of memory. And so we are prompted to ask: If we cannot return to a matrilineal society, might it instead become a point of departure? Can we draw from its principle a vision of the future—one grounded in care, collaboration, and shared life? Perhaps the moment we sit down is the moment our journey of reimagining begins.