When Shouting Produces No Echo is a site-specific, interactive project that explores diasporic experience.

As a child of immigrants, I have always experienced heritage from a place of removal. In recent years, I have been living in towns on the fringe of the diaspora. Twice distant from my cultural origins, I am often misconstrued as foreign. This misidentification is inevitably entangled with the appropriation, fetishization and performance of ‘eastern’ culture.

The 2019 PASEO coincides with 中秋节, the Mid-Autumn Festival. When Shouting Produces No Echo reinterprets the Mid-Autumn tradition of moon viewing in the context of diasporic experience. In reframing the custom of moon viewing, it expands notions of tradition, authenticity, and ownership.

The installation consists of small video projections that are unobtrusively installed in the built environment. The videos are visual experimentations

with ultravisibility and anonymity, orbit and center, reflection and imitation, distance and scale—phenomena that have emerged from both my daily experience and my research on diasporas.

Tucked into the built environment and hidden in plain sight, the projections are non-spectacles. They do not solicit attention; rather, they are stumbled upon and discovered.

About the artist: Caitlyn Au lives and works in Taos, New Mexico. Au’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Hammerspace Gallery (Portland) and Saranac Art Projects (Washington), and was featured in group exhibitions at Spring/Break Art Show (New York) and Unnamed Gallery (New York). She has been an artist-in-residence at Art Farm Nebraska, Laboratory Spokane, and DongDong & LuLu China. In 2020 she will be an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Au holds a BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design.