Eddie Choo Wen Yi
About the artwork
Rewound Trading Legacies: Family Flashbacks
Essay Film
Through the lens of a Bauer Super 8 camera, Rewound Trading Legacies: Family Flashbacks explores memory, migration, and the intersections of personal and industrial histories.
The artist reconstructs absent family archives by creating new footage, reimagining memories that were never visually documented. This project began with the discovery of a broken Bauer Super 8 camera, manufactured in Malaysia between 1970–1990 by the Robert Bosch Germany company, during her time in Germany. The camera provoked thoughts on her father’s admiration for Germany and German products—an admiration shaped by his respect for their quality and precision, though he never engaged with them directly nor visited Germany himself.
Choo’s research extended to the neighborhoods surrounding the Bosch plant in Malaysia, tracing the entanglements between global industry and local economies. These explorations reveal how infrastructure not only shapes economic landscapes but also imprints itself onto personal and collective histories. By translating silences into a visual and auditory language, Rewound Trading Legacies challenges the authority of historical documentation, asking: How do memories that never existed visually shape our understanding of place, identity, and belonging in the context of global histories?
About the artist
Eddie Choo Wen Yi (b. 1988) is a multidisciplinary artist from Malaysia, based in Finland. Their work is rooted in moving image, archives, and installation. They explore the intersections of personal and collective histories while reflecting on power dynamics and social structures. Eddie is a member of Station of Commons, and their artistic research, “Rewound Trading Legacies: Family Flashbacks”, was supported by the Finnish Art Society’s Young Artist Grant in 2023.
