Solveig Qu Suess works within the fields of documentary film and artistic research. She draws on feminist science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, and visual ethnography to examine questions of power, aesthetics, and epistemic politics. Through her documentary work, she has been developing filmmaking as an intimate practice within global processes.
Since 2022, she has been working on two films concurrently: Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains, set along the Mekong River, which explores the downstream politics of hydroelectric dam construction on the Mekong, where the river becomes a device to research a series of infrastructural transformations between China and Southeast Asia; and Little Grass, a film on memory and belonging as it relates to the history of geopolitical division between China and the West, seen through the lens of her mother's career as an optical engineer.
In 2018-2022 Qu Suess co-authored Geocinema— a documentary-led project that explored histories of how environmental sensing has articulated Earth’s transformations, using cinematic methods to investigate aesthetics within geopolitical systems. Solveig's works have been shown widely in exhibitions and festivals, her writing has been published by Duke University Press, Lausan, E-Flux Architecture, the Funambulist, and Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. She is currently artist-in-residence at NYU Shanghai, and is a PhD candidate in Urban Studies at the University of Basel. https://linktr.ee/solveigqusuess