On ELSEHERE and STRATUM
by Valkyrie Yao, Founding Editor
There is a moment before a work acquires a category.
Before it becomes performance, moving image, research, or documentation.
Before it is filed under dance, installation, theory, or media art.
That pre-categorical moment is where STRATUM begins.
Much of what shapes our cultural memory appears first in rehearsal rooms, temporary studios, late-night notes, fragmentary videos, and quiet conversations long before it appears in a program, an archive, or a library record. It lives in this interval and often disappears there as well. For STRATUM, this interval is neither an appendix nor an afterthought, but the place where things truly begin. It takes seriously the after-images, residual gestures, minor scenes, and unfinished lines of thought that drift outside existing categories, and tries to let them remain a little longer in the field of attention.
STRATUM exists to surface, connect, and preserve contemporary artistic and intellectual practices that remain outside institutional classifications. It is committed to keeping remanent practices and vertical histories in circulation rather than letting them disappear into private memory, scattered files, or uncredited influence. At the same time, it attempts to develop modes of seeing and writing that differ from mainstream art histories and genealogies of knowledge, treating each body and each act of creation as a complete historical axis in its own right, rather than a footnote to some larger narrative.
Many of the practices we care about here are remanent. They leave traces without always leaving records. They shape teaching and learning without appearing on syllabi. They shift aesthetics without entering museum labels. They persist in collective memory while remaining absent from official histories. STRATUM understands these not as peripheral noise, but as strata that need to be made visible and shareable, moving them from invisible layers in individual experience into a public plane where they can be pointed to, cited, and carried forward.
STRATUM aims to become a long-term, accessible archive where bodies, works, and sites that have been treated as marginal, minor, finished, difficult to classify, or not officially recognised can continue to act as sources for thinking, making, and teaching. In a world mapped from the center outward, STRATUM turns to the edges, helping to draw their contours and reimagining how knowledge can move, branch, and persist like a shared bloodstream.
For me, this work is not abstract. It is biographical. My own practice and research move between choreography, performance, moving image, writing, and digital forms, and between China and the United States. I was trained inside and alongside institutions, yet many of the processes that shaped me most deeply happened in spaces slightly off center. STRATUM is one way of acknowledging that these experiences are not auxiliary. They are the very layers through which a practice thickens, branches, and learns to look back at history. This journal tries to offer these layers a form that can be shared, cited, and passed on, while still respecting their fragility and specificity.
The name STRATUM carries several layers. It refers to the geological image of strata as accumulated time, pressure, and memory. It also gestures toward social, bodily, and technological layers: surfaces where histories sediment yet rarely receive full attention. This journal is not interested in a single dominant layer. It is interested in the contact zones between them: the faint hinge between rehearsal and performance, the leftover files after a project ends, the local gestures that never make it into official timelines but quietly reorganise how people see and feel.
STRATUM is published within ELSEHERE and is interwoven with it, but the two are not the same. ELSEHERE holds the moving projects that unfold on stage and screen, where bodies, images, and technologies meet. STRATUM is one of its deeper layers: a stratum in which these movements are recorded, reflected, and rewritten in text, image, and mediated form, so that they can continue to be shared and remembered beyond a single event or platform.
ELSEHERE builds infrastructures for practices still breathing between worlds. STRATUM provides a place where those practices can be named on their own terms, in multiple languages and formats, without being reduced to a single discipline or market logic. Together, they form a continuum between movement and sedimentation: between gesture and record, between event and archive, between situated experience and transregional circulation.
This first issue gathers works that do not neatly resolve. Some move between choreography and cinema, some inhabit the border between fieldwork and myth, some emerge from correspondence, ritual, or speculative research. Many of them have lived for a long time in drives, notebooks, shared folders, or private conversations. Bringing them together here is not an act of completion. It is an act of re-entering a process, acknowledging that a work continues to think and feel beyond its premiere, its exhibition, or its original context.
STRATUM is multilingual by design, treating the use of multiple languages not only as access but as a structural metaphor for moving between mediums, registers, and ways of knowing. Contemporary practice does not think in one language alone, and neither do its audiences. You will find English alongside Chinese, and in future issues, other languages as well. Translation here is not just a service. It is a method of noticing what cannot be carried across, what must remain untranslatable, and where multiple vocabularies can be held side by side rather than smoothed into uniformity. The journal will publish materials that move between practice and theory, image and text, archive and live encounter: essays, conversations, visual sequences, scores, scripts, fragments, and research notes.
This journal follows the tempo of its contents. Issues are released when the work has reached its own form, rather than according to a fixed commercial schedule. The goal is not constant production but sustained attention: to give each contribution enough space to resonate, and to build a reading experience that feels closer to entering a field of relations than scrolling through a feed. Each issue may gather works around a relatively open field rather than a tightly closed theme: a gesture, a forgotten lineage, a technological threshold, a mode of listening, a way of inhabiting cities or more-than-human environments.
From this perspective, STRATUM is both a publication and a long-term archive. It aims to provide a space that is stable yet porous, where works and thoughts that might otherwise remain isolated can begin to resonate with one another. Its founding is not a summation but a starting point. It does not attempt to draw a definitive boundary around an already fixed field, but acknowledges that many practices, histories, and collaborations have yet to be placed in view alongside one another.
I would like to invite artists, writers, researchers, curators, educators, and readers who recognise themselves in this description, or feel adjacent to it, to treat STRATUM as a place where a work can arrive before it has been fully named. Proposals, fragments, translations, and long-term research are all forms we welcome.
For artists and writers, we hope it can function as a place where work that does not fit existing formats can still be held carefully and taken seriously.
For curators, educators, and researchers, we hope it can offer source material and methods that trouble inherited categories and timelines.
For readers who may not work inside institutions but remain deeply attuned to art and culture, we hope it can be a space to encounter practices that are usually hard to find, or quickly disappear from view.
This is the first layer. Many others will follow.
Thank you for entering STRATUM at its beginning, and for spending time with the works and voices assembled here.
Valkyrie Yao / 姚雨欣
Founding Editor, STRATUM
Founder and Artistic Director, ELSEHERE
New York / Beijing / Shanghai
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