
The project A Letter from Home is a short docufiction film inspired by Li Chaolin's family history that explores familial bonds—both genuine and incidental—across three generations.
The Letter from Home is a narrative process in progress. Its origins date back to a true story Li Chaolin's family experienced. In the late 1980s, a letter sent from Taiwan, after a long wait, unexpectedly connected families who had not known each other before, bringing with it the memories and emotions of three generations. Years later, as Li Chaolin herself constantly navigates between home and elsewhere, memory becomes a passageway. It opens up a space where everyday life, history, and what has never been said unfold between reality and fiction. The experience of diaspora life, absence, and collective wounds passed down from generation to generation recur constantly in narratives marked by the ruptures of major historical upheavals.
Through family archives, letters, images, and voices Li Chaolin follows the letter with the moving image. In search of a possible place to settle, at the crossroads of wandering and sedentarization, in a process of slow and continuous collective healing.
Li Chaolin is an artist and cultural worker whose practice moves fluidly across collective processes, diasporic experiences, and storytelling. The experience of growing up in a small town in Southwest China, and later studying and living in France and Switzerland, they developed a sense of perceiving the hidden layers in everyday life, much like the moon, always present, sometimes invisible.
Their practice lingers in these relations of appearing and disappearing, suspension and pause. Using actions, humorous drifting, and low-tech methods, they bring to the surface emotions, memories, and relationships that are often overlooked in the daily experience, operating in the gaps between fiction and reality. They see themself as a spontaneous playground, using the “I” both as a medium and as a process. Moving between memory, dreams, and collective experience, their work explores how the self is continuously reshaped through encounters with others, and how these transformations resonate within broader social and historical contexts.
Estimated Duration: 15 minutes
Showing: Halle Nord, Geneva, 17 April - 9 May 2026
photo credit @Grandee Doriji