Rusty Odyssey

2020 Experimental Film Single-channel video, color, sound, 14min 25sec

Copper
Film
Rusty Odyssey

Completed

Rusty Odyssey depicts the colonial faces of three copper coins (VOC Duit, Japanese Sen, and Euro coin), tracing their guilty chronicle from the 18th century to the present day in the Netherlands, Japan, and Korea.

Transcending time and territories, the film cuts across the temporal dimensions of the geographies where the coins were born and follows the transformation of the monetary material as it is vitalized by capital. Rusty Odyssey reveals the colonial phantom behind the faces of the coins through the sites where history is staged. The fluctuating heartbeat of copper, an inheritor of colonial capitalism, lives on.

Abstract crystalline copper formation from Rusty Odyssey

Oxidized copper surface textures from Rusty Odyssey

Reconstructed copper coin from Rusty Odyssey

Unwrapped copper figure from Rusty Odyssey