“From my village I see as much as from earth one can see of the Universe… Therefore my village is as big as any other earth, because I am the size of what I see, and not the size of my own height…”
中間人 / Go-Between
Go-Between explores Hong Kong and the Canton region through a personal return following seven years of absence - a period shaped by the loss of the photographer’s grandmother and by the accelerated transformation of the environments tied to her family history. Through monochrome photographs, Felicitas observes how identity is shaped and challenged by spaces that evolve faster, than personal or collective memory can keep up. The images navigate the contrasts between familiarity and estrangement, past and present, the intimate and the overwhelming, and wonder how people preserve a sense of self within vast cityscapes. Through this approach, the project offers a reflection on belonging, dislocation, and the shifting tension between personal identity and the places that continue to redefine it.
Interview about Go-Between for Visual Art Journal issue #49, released 28/02/26
Artists’ statement
Growing up, we regularly visited family in China and simultaneously witnessed the changes that drastically sculpted the landscape in the late 90s and early 2000s. Crossing a border felt like a simple formality, so the extreme protectionism that ensued from the pandemic came as a shock. Not only was my family deprived of being at my father’s mother’s funeral, but we wouldn’t be able to visit the country for another seven years. A lot had changed in that time, including my professional career shift from cinema to photography, which taught me how to pay an aesthetically sensible kind of attention, and in turn had opened up a whole new world of perspectives. As a result, returning to Hong Kong and Canton, carried an anticipation that was both professional and deeply personal.
The ensuing set of images are an exploration of memory and identity. What I encountered were cities that felt recognizable only in fragments—spaces I had defined through personal experiences that had been transformed beyond easy reconciliation. This was most palpable when stepping into what used to be my grandmother’s apartment: rented out furnished, everything was more or less untouched, which made her absence only more unbearable. Ironic that the only place I would’ve welcomed the change of ended up being her apartment. My sense of being slightly out of place used to be linked to my mixed race appearance, now it felt much deeper: being raised across different cultural and geographic contexts, I am accustomed to negotiating belonging, and this return intensified that condition.
The camera became both a shield and a vessel: a means of maintaining distance while allowing for careful attention. The act of looking became a method of re-encountering a place without the expectation of coherence, and photographing offered a way to slow down environnements that are driven by rapid change. I traced my own process of return: the images emerge from an in-between position, where memory, place, and identity momentarily converge. In this sense, the images become less about recovery than about negotiating how one continues to belong to places that persist in changing.