Medialab-Matadero Madrid
Solveig Qu Suess, LAB 4 Weird Futures faculty
Solveig Qu Suess is a filmmaker and researcher currently based in Shanghai. Her work explores how large-scale systems—whether energy grids, optical technologies, or planetary sensing networks—imprint themselves on intimate terrains. Her recent film work investigates the reprogramming of a river’s rhythms by distant energy demands, as well as the silence surrounding her mother’s work in the development and trade of optics in 1980s China. Solveig is joining Medialab as faculty of the fourth LAB program, titled Weird Futures. We asked her to respond to our White Paper, a conceptual framework for Medialab’s 2025 program of creative and critical research conceived as a set of prompts for the participants in the Collaborative Prototyping Lab (to be held in Madrid in November 2025). Solveig first shared with us a text that outlines her approach towards image making in a time of profound misalignments. In the ensuing webinar she expands on those ideas, finding numerous possible connections between her research and the topics that we would like to explore in the LAB 4. The result is a profound call for creative and critical research across the multiple spectrums of uncertainty, large scale systems, intimacy, deep violence, and their representation through the moving image. The webinar and the text have been commissioned by Medialab in May 2025.
Solveig Qu Suess is a filmmaker and researcher living between Switzerland and China. 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. Her works have been screened and exhibited internationally, including at the Kunsthall Trondheim, International Film Festival Rotterdam, ArtScience Museum Singapore. Her writing has been published by Duke University Press, Lausan, E-Flux Architecture, the Funambulist, and Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.
https://linktr.ee/solveigqusuess