We Walked out of the Cave

Talum Isbabanal (Yi-fan Du) has been involved in photojournalism and theater work for many years. For his first curatorial project, he uses the narratives in the immersive videos to raise questions. The curatorial team sees that the self-regulation within Indigenous communities' social orders synchronously responds to their bodily order. Also, such self-regulation is associated with the barriers of mountains, the political dominations, and the acts of violence in the histories. Therefore, the project aims to unlock the ulterior motive for Indigenous people’s ambivalence on mixed identity, their psychological barriers when returning to the community, and the awakening of distant ancestor genes. Through the curatorial mechanism of the Pulima Art Festival, it intends to contend the bodily order, lead to rapprochement with the regulations, and unites the internal value of the team. 

Separation has become a profound sensation within the production process. Even though people are from the same community or the same ethnic group --- the mountains, conveyor belts, mining pits, national laws, and river ropeways have become the barriers that divorce the communal living condition for the Fushi village residents. Similar to the methods adopted in the action research, Talum Isbabanal participated and recorded Fushi villagers’ labor. He photographed five people from the community and deliberately omitted the names of these subjects. “Gmeguy Jiyax (The Time Thief)”,  "Gmeguy Btunux (The Stone Thief)", “Gmeguy Tm Samat (The Poacher)”, “Meguy Slaq(The Dirt Thief)” and “Gmeguy Dxgal(The Stolen Man)”. These five pieces are respectively symbolizing people who return to their traditional cultures, the miners, the hunters, the farmers, and the landscape. These photographs also echo Hsiao-Hui Liu's six videos titled " 2 Gone Mountain", which not only expresses the life in the Fushi village, but also the relationship between human beings and the land.

In the play "Wandering in the Others’ Land", Talum Isbabanal talks about the returns ( Clifford, 2013) of the culture as Bunun. His solo confession made in the cave seems to resonate with Ms. Ciwang’s life, who had broken through the cage of historical violence and shaken up the traditional values. The work also implies "Allegory of the Cave",  as the work suggests the philosopher’s journey on seeking true knowledge. Talum Isbabanal becomes the person who casts the shadow, and the audience sits in the cave, listening to the echoes made when Talum returns to his community, watching the shadows projected by the eagerness and the ambivalence of a mixed-blood Indigenous identity in this era. The play also shows that the physical burden of hiking, entering the cave, and walking affects our process of thinking and has become a part of our knowledge production.

The core concept of the exhibition is to explore the order between people and the land. As we reflect, recalibrate, and be inspired through the process of curatorial knowledge production, we also become the one who tries to see clearly between the truth and the shadows. Since the Enlightenment, the order of the modern age is uneven and patchy, however, people from their Indigenous communities did not wave goodbye to the bygones, they constructed new orders that connect cultural orders from the past, which include reviving their ethnic language, hunting, gathering, and returning to their ancestral land. As a member of the curatorial team, Talum has researched the field and possessed a posteriori knowledge. He tries to transcend from the world of suffering and capture the sincere characteristics of his subjects, seeing how they strive to break through the current version of realities. Situating in the system generated from the Indigenous communities’ environment, Talum practiced his bodily order as a foreigner and a mix-blood, he then got the truth beyond the empirical reality and eventually walked out of the cave.