Contested Waters Workshop – BEITOU PAK-HÁI

🥕Body is not merely a tool for sensing the world, it is a landscape: shaped by microclimates, soundscapes, and seismic movements. It is an island, an expanse of endless tides, an ecosystem where environment and human beings are entangled, co-creating and continuously reshaping one another.

This workshop, set in Beitou, begins at the local market—a site of scent, sound, and food. Participants will be guided through processes of observing, eating, and digesting food, ultimately listening, recording and translating the voices within their own bellies.

Beitou’s unique terrain—its geothermal heat, sulfur, markets, old eateries, and layered histories—forms a local food code inscribed by landscape and time. Yet this code is also swept into larger, fluid, and mixed networks. The sound within our bellies emerged from the logistics, policies, soils, microbes, and ancestral memory, which then chewed, absorbed, excreted by us once again.

From gastrointestinal politics to landscape justice, from the rumble of digestion to the roar of resistance—this is an acoustic geology of the body. Let us listen inward, and begin to trace the ecologies, politics, and temporalities we carry inside.

🍉 About Esther Lin

Currently working and living in Taipei, Taiwan, Esther Lin completed her MFA degree in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Lin mainly works with body measurement and psychological perception, inquires about logic in everyday life, and opens up the intersection between imagination and reality. Her works are mostly spatial installations. Through arrangement of images, documents, and objects, Lin delves into the fluidity of identity, the moments of modern systems, and the process of memory production.

🥜 About Contested Waters

Contested Waters, curated by I-Yi Hsieh, is a project connecting aquatic aesthetics from Taipei, Kaohsiung, and Venice. It swims into the ways in which waters are militarized, capitalized, and troubled in the age of hyper geopolitical frictions. The project brings together the artists from Taiwan, India, and Finland to explore new horizons toward conceiving and re-conceiving aquatic futures as critical material connections.

1.This workshop includes video and photo documentation as well as the sensory and physical activities guided by the artist. The content produced during the workshop may be used for future promotional materials, publications, and other related projects. By registering for this workshop, participants agree to be photographed and to have their images published.

2.Participants are responsible for covering their own meal expenses during the workshop.

3.Confirmed participants will receive a notification email within three working days. Additionally, a pre-event notice will be sent at least three days before the workshop. Please ensure that the email address you provide is accurate.

4.If you are unable to attend the event, please notify us in advance via email.