Fireworks, Volcano, Home
Video-Sound Installation; Performance, 2023-2024
Artist Residency Project at SIM Residency, Reykjavík (IS)
Kotka Art Biennial (FI), 2024
Visualisation Studio, Aalto University (FI), 2024
In Fireworks, Volcano, Home (2024), interdisciplinary artist Tianjun Li explores the paradoxical interplay of displacement and belonging through a video-sound-performance work created during his residency at SÍM Residency in Reykjavík, Iceland. This project is an extension of his ongoing series, Today, Tomorrow, and the Tales from the Wind, and reflects on the intertwined forces of natural phenomena, personal migration, and the fragility of home.
Triggered by the simultaneous eruption of a volcano and the celebratory fireworks of New Year’s Eve, the work combines collective joy with individual solitude. Li draws parallels between the fleeting brilliance of fireworks and the devastating power of volcanoes—forces that reshape landscapes and lives. Using his body and voice as primary mediums, he captures spinning movements across Icelandic landscapes, blending the fiery motion of eruptions with the ephemeral beauty of celebration.
The video layers these spinning movements with imagery of Icelandic fireworks, creating a visual dialogue that blurs the line between destruction and renewal. The accompanying soundscape integrates displaced residents’ voices, field recordings of New Year’s fireworks, and Li’s vocal experimentation, mirroring the volcanic process—quiet solitude erupting into violent energy before fading back into stillness.
Through this work, Li reimagines home as an ephemeral state of being, shaped by chaos and stillness, connection and solitude. The ritualistic act of spinning becomes a metaphor for the fragile tension between loss and resilience, highlighting the universal search for belonging amidst forces beyond our control.
Artist Statement
In Fireworks, Volcano, Home, I confront my evolving relationship with the idea of home—a concept that feels both tender and transient, much like the landscapes I encountered in Iceland. As someone who has experienced displacement, I find myself drawn to moments where the line between joy and loss, stillness and chaos, becomes blurred.
The volcanic eruption in Grindavík and the New Year’s fireworks in Reykjavík became two opposing yet interconnected forces that framed my reflections. Fireworks erupt in dazzling bursts, bringing people together in celebration, while volcanoes surge with destructive power, scattering communities and reshaping the earth. Both are fleeting, brilliant, and transformative, echoing the paradox of home—simultaneously a place of belonging and impermanence.
Spinning became my way of embodying this paradox. As I turned across the icy landscapes, the dizziness mirrored the disorientation of uprootedness, while the freedom in motion reminded me of resilience. The act of spinning was a ritual—an exploration of control and surrender, of being both observer and participant in a moment of transformation.
In the soundscape, my voice rises from solitude to eruption, folding in field recordings and interviews with displaced residents. Through these layers, I sought to connect the intimate and the collective, imagining how it feels to lose one’s home while standing amidst a crowd celebrating the future.
This work is deeply personal yet intentionally open-ended. It speaks to the universal fragility of existence and the shared human experience of finding—and losing—a sense of place. By merging my own narrative with Iceland’s landscapes and its people’s stories, I hope to evoke the delicate balance between destruction and creation, solitude and connection, that defines our search for belonging in a world of constant change.
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Stockholm Fringe Festival, Stockholm, 2024