Forgotten Waters

Forgotten Waters is a short film featuring wearable sculptures inspired by the relationship between jellyfish and their environment. The film seeks to bring attention to our own relationship with nature and imagines how us humans, thinking beings with agency, would behave if we lived as jellyfish.

• Art direction, costumes, editing, script, vocals: Shannon Yeung

• Cinematography: Evan Parness

• Performers in order of appearance: Malavika Sabu, Yuki Obayashi and Elpis Wong

Special thanks for artsatmichigan for the support. Learn more about their grants and funding here.

Context & Inspiration

As a designer, I feel a responsibility to reflect on our throwaway culture, the cost of convenience and my role within it. In the face of our climate crisis, we must recognise that there is simply nothing more inconvenient than an inhabitable planet.

With Forgotten Waters, I wish to depict how jellyfish mirror our vulnerable human existence and inspire reflection about our destructive activities. When jellyfish are washed ashore, they evaporate and die because they are 95% water. This means that jellyfish are essentially 95% their environment, making the ocean more than just their habitat; it is literally a preservation necessity — not unlike our Earth to us. Indeed, it is widely accepted that we are products of our environment. What happens if we shift the relationship from mere influence to unity — from “we are products of our environment” to “we are our environment”?

“There may be as many as 4,800 different species of jellyfish. Not every kind possesses a sting that is perceptible to humans. Individual jellyfish are fragile creatures. Being composed largely of soft collagen, they easily tear. In a net or bunted along a reef by a storm surge, jellyfish are soon shredded. Washed ashore, they evaporate, leaving only a remnant halo of mesoglea (the jellyfish’s gluey core). Organized water: That was one 19th-century naturalist’s minifying description of the jellyfish. The creature’s wispy anatomy confers on it the specific beauty of the readily destroyed, a quality that elicits comparisons to things that are empty and lambent—light bulbs, dropped lingerie, a nebular constellation, the cellophane wrappers from hotel soaps, dribbles of wax”

– Rebecca Giggs, Imagining the Jellyfish Apocalypse

Sketches & Planning

To draw parallels between the jellyfish and human beings, I felt it was important to capture the form of the jellyfish as well as how it navigates in the water. For research, I watched many documentaries of jellyfish at different stages in life and how their form adapts accordingly. Once I choreographed the movements, I chose lightweight, transparent fabrics that would float in water and added details such as trims and ribbons that helped highlight certain gestures. Below are select slides from a briefing presentation I delivered to my collaborators.