Zijing (Echo) Wan is a PhD candidate at Edinburgh Napier University within the School of Arts & Creative Industries.

This showcase presents three video stills from an ongoing creative documentary exploring how memory is enacted and shared within the daily lives of Chinese diasporic communities in Edinburgh. My project, developed through Practice-as-research, investigates how documentary filmmaking can operate as both a relational method and poetic form of knowledge-making.

The current stage of research centres on Susan and her friends includes me. Susan is a Hakka Hongkong elder whose embodied practices of cooking, singing, dancing, walking, storytelling, and ritual care have opened new ways of understanding diasporic memory.

Through sustained, situated encounters filmed across domestic and communal settings-from kitchen to kitchen, from conversation to singing. The film asks how memory becomes performative: enacted in gesture, silence, gathering, and refusal.

The stills capture intimate, everyday moments that collectively articulate a fragmented and affective archive of cultural survival. The documentary work is guided by experimental ethnographic methods and poetic film practices. This visual showcase offers a glimpse into how diasporic memory is coproduced through trust, time and shared space.