Rachele Maistrello

“Green Diamond” is a project that plays with the liminarity between real and fiction, historical archive and science fiction. “Green Diamond” was a Chinese hi-tech company whose purpose was to develop special microchips, capable of eliciting sensations in the human body related to the natural world. On 1998, the company hired the acrobat Gao Yue to test the GD sensors. Gao Yue and Li Jian Ping (a sensor-cleaning worker) had a relationship, which led Li Jian Ping to collect a large number of documents about Gao Yue’s daily work at the company. Through the reconstruction of Li Jian Ping’s archives, made up of analog photographs and paper findings, “Green Diamond” tells a story using the criterion of historical reconstruction. The documents prove what has been constructed to create questions, to confuse about the credibility of the tale. The exotic is used to test the remnants of a colonial culture, in which the “far” place, is often relegated to an area where facts to be judged happen, without caring about what is unknown. The documentary essence of the photographic document becomes a way to conceive a credible science fiction, which looks towards the past instead of the future.