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Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.

Aren’t we all just sunflowers reaching for each other in the dark?
Wytchings (Jenny Trinh) and Aswang Nibbles (Carielyn Tunion)

Aren’t we all just sunflowers reaching for each other in the dark? is a collaborative videopoem between writer and videopoet, Aswang Nibbles (Carielyn Tunion-Lam) and musician, Wytchings (Jenny Trinh). In a tender braid of video, sound, and writing, the two artists gathered footage using camcorders, capturing vignettes of presence and filming quiet moments of shadow and light within our daily lives.

This project gathered these fragments – pockets of joy, grief, quiet company and togetherness between loved ones, to form a collective library of memories. Blooming is not only floral, but fractal. It is something that emerges like flowers through concrete cracks, in shared meals, in connected joys, in grief softened by familiar hands.

The videopoem opens with an exchange of voice memos between Aswang Nibbles and Wytchings before eventually melting into an original soundscape piece that features layered vocals from the two artists. Fragments of poetry displayed as subtitles and the collected camcorder footage converge into the main videopoem – a dreamy hybrid of documentary, dream, and prayer. It will not claim resolution. It will hum with the surreal and unspeakable, holding space for what resists language, conclusion or totality. We believe that in honouring the strange and special shadows of daily life, we reconfigure time itself: not linear, but cyclical, ever-blooming.

This work asks – what if survival is a garden we tend together? What if the act of witnessing – softly, imperfectly, lovingly – is itself a form of repair?

Jenny Trinh is a Western Sydney artist who performs solo as Wytchings. Creating dreamy, film-inspired sounds evoking that of space and water, she has collaborated with artists like Red Rey, Leeroy New, Sile Ellis, Jada Narkle & Carielyn Tunion-Lam to create accompanying soundscapes for their works, which have been showcased at Soft Centre, Sydney World Pride, Yirramboi Festival, Marrugeku, and Sydney Opera House. In addition to that, she sound designed Liquid Homelands, a queer, experimental radio project on FBi Radio’s Race Matters. Psamathe (2022), the final album in her Neptune trilogy, features ‘Fata Morgana’, the song nominated for Song of the Year at the FBi SMACs and part of the Wettest 100. In addition to her solo work as Wytchings, she is also in a band with her friends Kashif (Kash Bhai) & Zac (roomers): Heart Armour as well as Worlds Only, an intercontinental transient ambient group, featuring Alister Hill, Darren Lesaguis, Justin Tam (Tzekin), Reginald Harris & Thomas William Smith (T.Morimoto).

Carielyn Tunion-Lam / 林嘉蓮 (she/they) is a writer, videopoet, artist and cultural worker with a background in screen and media arts. She has also worked in the community sector supporting migrant and refugee women; and has experience in creative approaches for grassroots community organising. Carielyn’s work explores themes of yearning and radical nostalgia from an anticolonial diasporic perspective. Through her study of ritual and folklore, she is interested in conjuring worlds, cracking open the ancestral bone to suck the marrow of identity, desire, and myth. Carielyn’s ancestral roots are in the archipelago of the so-called Philippines and Kowloon, Hong Kong. She currently lives, studies, works and treads respectfully on unceded Burramattagal on Dharug country.

Editorial: Varsha Ramesh
Digital: Thomas Capogreco

Aren’t we all just sunflowers reaching for each other in the dark?