STRATUM Journal — Issue 01 (Inaugural Issue)
Editor’s Letter: 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

STRATUM Journal / 第一期（创刊号）

在事件与命名之间，总是存在一段延迟。
在作品被归入某个类别之前，总有一个片刻。
在它被命名为表演、影像、研究或档案之前。
在它被放进舞蹈、装置、理论或媒介艺术的格子之前。
STRATUM 从这个「尚未被分类的片刻」开始说起。

作品首先出现在排练厅、临时工作室、深夜的笔记里，出现在零碎的视频片段和低声的对话之中，而远早于它们出现在节目册、档案库或图书馆记录里。塑造我们文化记忆的，往往就栖居在这段「间隙」里，也同样在这里悄然消失。

对 STRATUM 来说，这段间隙既不是附注，也不是尾声，而是事情真正开始的地方。它认真对待那些游离于制度分类之外的余像、残存动作、微小场景与未竟思考，并试图为它们在观者的视野中多打开一点停留的时间。

STRATUM 的存在，是为了呈现、连接并保存那些游离于既有制度性分类之外的当代艺术与思想实践。期刊致力于让这些「残存实践」与「垂直历史」持续在公共视野中流动，而不是悄然消失在私人记忆、零散文件或未被署名的影响力之中。

同时，我们尝试发展一种不同于主流艺术史与知识谱系的观看与书写方式，将每一个身体、每一次创作、每一块在地现场，都当作一条自足而完整的历史轴线，而非某个宏大叙事的注脚。

许多我们在此关心的实践都是「残存性的」：它们留下痕迹，却未必留下记录；它们深刻影响着教与学，却未必出现在课程大纲；它们改变审美，却未必进入美术馆标签；它们在集体记忆中持续存在，却从未被纳入「正式历史」。STRATUM 希望将这些垂直的历史，从只存在于个体经验的隐形层，转移到可以被共享、被指认、被引用的公共层。

STRATUM 希望成为一个长期可访问的档案，使那些被视为边缘、微小、已经结束、难以归类或未被正式承认的身体、作品与场域，得以继续作为思考、创作与教学的来源。在一个从中心向外制图的世界里，STRATUM 转向地图的边缘，帮助描绘那些仍在生成中的轮廓，重新想象知识如何像一条共享的血脉那样流动、分支与延续。
对我而言，这并不是一个抽象的议题，也是我的个人垂直历史。

我的实践和研究在编舞、表演、影像写作与数字形态之间移动，也在中国与美国之间移动。我曾在体制之内与体制边缘受训，但真正塑造我的，往往是那些「离中心略远」的空间。STRATUM 是一种承认这些经历并非附属的方式，也是承认一段实践正是通过这些层理得以变厚、分支，并学会回望历史的方式。此刊试图为这些层理提供一种可以被共享、被引用、被持续传递的形式，同时保持对其脆弱性与特异性的尊重。

「STRATUM」一词本身带有多重含义。它首先指向地质意义上的地层，是由时间、压力与记忆层层积累而成。同时，它也指涉社会的、身体的、技术的不同层面，那些历史在其上沉积，却很少被完整凝视的表面。本刊并不试图寻找某一条横向主导层，而是关注垂直层与层之间的接触地带：排练与演出之间的那道缝隙，项目结束后遗留在硬盘里的文件，本地行动未必进入官方时间线，却悄然改变观看与感受方式的那些时刻。

STRATUM 出版于 ELSEHERE 之内，与之相互交织，却并非同一事物。ELSEHERE 承载那些发生在现场与屏幕上的运动性项目，在其中，身体、影像与技术彼此相遇。而 STRATUM 则是其中一层更为深处的地层：在这里，这些实践的流动被记录、反思，并以文字、图像与媒介形式层层书写与再阐释，使它们能够在某一次事件或某一个平台之外继续被分享与记忆。如果说 ELSEHERE 主要在「运动中」工作，那么 STRATUM 则主要在「层次与沉积」中工作。

ELSEHERE 为那些超出分类的实践搭建基础设施，STRATUM 则提供一个空间，让这些实践得以用自己的语言、多种语言与形态被书写，而不是被压缩进某一种学科或市场的逻辑。二者共同构成一个连续体：在动作与记录之间，在现场与档案之间，在地方经验与跨地域流通之间。

本刊创刊号所收录的作品，大多并非已经「圆满结束」。它们有的在编舞与电影之间游移，有的处在田野与神话之间，有的源自往复的通信、仪式或推演性的研究。许多作品长期停留在硬盘、笔记本、共享文件夹或少数人的谈话中。将它们在此聚合，并不是为了封存，而是重新进入一个尚在持续的过程，承认作品在首演、展出或原始语境之外依然在继续思考与发声。

STRATUM 从一开始就被设定为多语种刊物，关注当代艺术、文化实践与人文思考。当代实践本身并不只在一种语言中思考，它的受众也不只是某一种语言共同体。你会在本刊中看到英文与中文，并在未来期数里看到更多语言的并置。对我们而言，翻译不仅是一种服务，更是一种方法：它帮助我们察觉那些无法被完全转译的部分，那些必须以差异并存的方式呈现的区段。本刊将发布介于实践与理论、图像与文字、档案与现场之间的材料：文章、对谈、视觉序列、行动与表演谱、文本片段与研究札记等。

与其追逐即时性，本刊更关心时间的延展。每一期会在内容成熟时发布，而不被固定周期所驱动；目标并不是「持续出内容」，而是「持续给予关注」。让每一份投稿拥有足够的呼吸空间，也让阅读 STRATUM 更接近走入一个关系场，而不是快速划过的信息流。每一期或许会围绕某个相对开放的「场域」聚拢文本与作品，而不是强调一个过于封闭的主题：一个动作、一条被遗忘的谱系、一道技术阈限、一种聆听方式、一种在城市或多重物种环境中栖居的方式。

从这个意义上说，STRATUM 既是一份出版物，也是一座长期档案。它希望提供一个相对稳定又保持渗透性的空间，让那些原本可能彼此孤立的作品与思考，有机会开始互相共振。

STRATUM 的创刊并不是一种总结，而是一种起点。它并不试图为一个已然固定的领域画出边界，而是承认：仍有许多实践、历史与合作尚未被「并置」在同一视野之中。

我想邀请在这段描述里看见自己，或感到与之相邻的艺术家、写作者、研究者、策展人、教育者与读者，将 STRATUM 视为一个「作品可以在被完全命名之前抵达」的地方。提案、片段、翻译与长期研究，都是我们欢迎的形态。

对艺术家与写作者，我们希望它是一个可以承接「不合规格」作品的空间，一个能被认真实地对待的地方。

对策展人、教育者与研究者，我们希望它提供一些会扰动既有分类与时间线的素材与方法。

对那些虽然不在机构内部工作，却始终敏感于艺术与文化的读者，我们希望这里可以汇聚那些平时难以被看见、或者很快消失的实践。

这是第一层，之后还会有更多层缓慢显形。

感谢你愿意与我们一起进入这块场域，并共同勾勒那些至今仍大多未被记录之物的轮廓。也感谢你愿意在此停留，与这些作品与声音共处一段时间。

姚雨欣 / Valkyrie Yao
STRATUM 创刊主编
ELSEHERE 创始人及艺术总监
New York / Beijing / Shanghai