MARE: In the Negative

Date
2026 April
Author / Publisher
Solveig Suess for MARE: Methods in Artistic Research.
Video

Excerpt from Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains (2025), dir. Solveig Qu Suess. HD video, stereo sound, 20 min.

References

Nash, Aily. “Volumes and Pressures: Deborah Stratman with Aily Nash.” The Brooklyn Rail, September 2012, https://brooklynrail.org/2012/09/film/volumes-and-pressures/.


Jerry C. Zee, Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022) — see especially his use of the term “parallax”.


Trinh T. Minh-ha, “A Pieced Self: Intimate Distances,” in The Creative Act: A Critical Reader, ed. Kerry B. Hultgren (Third Cinema Online, 2021), https://thirdcinema.net/portfolio/api_self-portrait/. See also Trinh’s reflections on the “interval” as a space of passage and relation in Cinema Interval (New York: Routledge, 1999).

Series

MARE is a series by the members of the SARN Focus Field Transdisciplinarity.

 

Filmed just after the sun’s departure, its left over rays cast the water an electric blue. I often return to this scene when I reflect on the question; how might we approach what exceeds immediate vision and representation? I had been working on the politics of the sustainable energy turn in SouthEast Asia, and was confronted by the challenge of filming something as large-scale and abstract as an energy transition, and as heavily securitized as a hydroelectric dam. A dam, for example, at once is both present and absent. It rarely appeared directly in my footage due to practical reasons, whether too distant and often inaccessible, and instead it became important to notice how it functions beyond its material form. Mapping it instead as something that displaces, redirects, buries, and sets other things in motion. Then, my initial question developed further into; how to render these other processes, and often their absences, perceptible without reverting to monumental images of infrastructure?

 

Methodologically, I have been thinking with the negative space as both visual technique and research practice. What is omitted, delayed, or obscured becomes a site of meaning. In filmmaking, this means attending not only to what enters the frame but also to what remains off-screen, incomplete, left as partial and fragmented. In one project, I traced the afterimage of a nondisclosure agreement signed by my mother during her work on classified optical technologies. The absence of what could be seen or spoken became a structuring force, revealing how secrecy, vision, and state power register across generations and into personal memory. Similarly, in tracing the downstream reverberations of dam construction along the Mekong, the film became a site of parallax— where technocratic logics of planning sit in friction with the embodied knowledge of those who sense the river’s altered pulse up close.

 

Field recordings and sound design offered another register of sensing, carrying textures and atmospheres that images could not. Archival fragments, documents, and home videos were activated counter to their original use as records or evidence, and in my films their gaps are foregrounded, with their authority unsettled. Thinking about rhythm, I often return to this quote from Deborah Stratman who described editing as a matter of volume and release—like building pressure in a pipe and letting it burst. This sense of editing as spatial and emotional tension has deeply shaped how I approach post-production. Together, these instruments allowed me to stage an inquiry where what cannot be shown becomes as significant as what appears.