Joshua Soenario






MOVING IMAGE
Slimy & Sticky
Big Bellied Snail

BOOK
In Between
Slow or Slower



About

Contact
joshuasoenario@gmail.com
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Big Bellied Snail / 2025
Single channel video, mixed media, 22’01’’





This work is grounded in the historical conditions of Chinese Indonesian diaspora—cycles of anti-Chinese violence, state and culture assimilation policies, and cross-border movements through which mobility gradually became a means of survival. My biological father’s life unfolded along these same historical fractures: from Indonesia to the United States, from the United States to Hong Kong, and from Hong Kong to Australia. Such a migratory trajectory produced a structural estrangement between us—an early rupture formed before I was old enough to understand, sedimented through silence and the dispersal of family memory.

When I was a few months old, my mother left my biological father taking me with her to set up a new life in Shanghai, 5000 miles away from our former home in Australia. When I was seven years old, she remarried, and from that point I never saw my birth father again; he gradually faded from my life and memory, becoming a distant and indistinct figure.

In 2025, a year after his death, I came across his funeral notice online, where my name was not included. This layered absence—his gradual disappearance from my life, my belated awareness of his death and my own absence from the record of his funeral— prompted me to begin a search, not only for him, but also for my own sense of identity.

My research developed along two lines: first, learning about my father’s life and character through conversations with my half-sister and with my mother and grandmother; and second, studying Indonesian culture and the history of Chinese Indonesians. During this process, I realized that the major periods of anti-Chinese persecution in Indonesia closely overlapped with the years my father lived there.

The film follows my journey to Guangzhou where I begin to search for his grave. As I enter the cemetery in a drifting, estranged state of mind, I encountered a mysterious figure who continues to haunt the film’s fragmented narrative, providing a sense of anchor and fantasy. By doing so, I interweave questions of identity, genealogy and mysticism. Visually the film is composed of a series of static frames that contain small movement, and the development of the narrative. The visual sequences are accompanied by a soundtrack featuring recorded conversations with my half-sister, mother and grandmother, combining factual and speculative accounts. Alongside these voices, a diaristic voice-over traces my search for his ashes, allowing the film to move between reality and fiction. In its restrained tone, the narration conveys an emotional dislocation shaped by my father’s death and the reconstruction of my identity.

Rather than attempting to reconstruct a truth, the film ultimately turns toward a re- articulation of the individual unconsciousness. Through childlike drawings that restage images encountered in a meditation following my departure from Guangzhou, the film reflects my understanding of identity as an ongoing process of negotiation, while exploring coexistence with grief and trauma.

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