In January 2026, invited to see the performance Wen Keng We Meet? — On Connection, I first exchanged a few brief messages online with members of RRRRRR Collective before finally meeting them in person at Gessnerallee Theater in Zurich. On the day of the interview, several members had already left Zurich and had to join by video call — the connection dropping in and out, small gaps in language surfacing now and then, making communication harder than it might otherwise have been. And yet this seemed to be a mode of communication they knew intimately. Because its members are scattered across different places, this collective does not work the way many artist groups do, sharing a single studio and city. Instead, each member develops their own practice independently, and the group reaches a kind of uneven consensus through a hybrid, “democratic” process — allowing their differences to converge rather than resolve.
RRRRRR Collective came together in 2018 through a four-month graduate course called Transcultural Collaboration. Liu Wen-Chi, an artist working primarily in mixed media and writing, is based between Taoyuan and Taipei; Chen Keng lives between Hangzhou and Shanghai; Dino Radoncic is based in St. Gallen; director and writer Eneas Prawdzic, along with the artist duo Nathalie Stirnimann and Stefan Stojanovic, are based in Zurich. After the course concluded — held partly in Hong Kong, partly in Zurich — the members returned to their respective cities. Geographic distance, compounded by pandemic-era isolation, pushed them to develop a working method built around remote connection. They have often traveled to one another’s cities through residencies and performances, working intensively within short windows of time to develop new pieces.
Wen Keng We Meet? – On Connection by RRRRRR Collective, Gessnerallee, Zurich, 29-31 January 2026. Photo © RRRRRR Collective & video footage © Florian Hinder
Wen Keng We Meet? — On Connection emerged from an invitation by sound artist and stage designer Dimitri de Perrot, as part of Open Studio by Studio DdP, a collaborative project with Gessnerallee Theater. The members each stepped away from their otherwise packed schedules to reconvene in the theater, and within a single month, wrote the script, filmed, recorded sound, edited video, and conceived the stage design — together.
Difference — particularly linguistic and cultural difference — is the factor they can least ignore when working together. Their shared language is English, yet their varying accents and habits of speech sometimes lead to misunderstanding, and sometimes become the source of humor instead. Liu Wen-Chi noted that, precisely because of this, the six of them never fuss over “correct” pronunciation, nor do they follow any fixed method of communication — their differences, instead, spark unexpected ideas through friction. The group’s name, RRRRRR, reflects this: across six people’s different languages and accents, the single letter “R” carries wildly different sounds.
But difference also makes for a far more complicated process of communication — one that is often drawn out, requiring many steps before everyone’s input can be gathered and a final decision reached. To complete this piece, they went through a long process of communication, listening to each other’s needs and opinions before they could settle on the material for the performance, or decide how the story would be told. Beyond the barriers of language and culture, each artist’s own habitual methods and media meant that, even as they worked to accommodate one another, they also had to consciously draw personal boundaries.
In the video projection, Chen Keng holds a balloon and walks along the coast of Xiamen, hoping Liu Wen-Chi, standing on the shore of Kinmen, might see them. Wen Keng We Meet? – On Connection by RRRRRR Collective © Florian Hinder
In the video, Liu Wen-Chi stands on the shore of Kinmen, looking toward Xiamen through a tourist telescope. Video still from Wen Keng We Meet? – On Connection by RRRRRR Collective © RRRRRR Collective
Liu Wen-Chi recalled a day when they realized they had all been staring at their laptops, working, without really talking to one another. So they set aside a day to sit together, listen to the sound recordings each of them had made, and talk about their individual hopes and fears. In the process of collaborating, there are always moments when one must set aside personal habits and convictions, giving up a part of oneself as a form of compromise — itself a necessary part of communication.
The performance carries two Chinese titles — “嗨，碰個面” and “常联系,” rendered respectively in traditional and simplified characters — reflecting how the subtitle On Connection takes on different expressions across the everyday linguistic contexts of traditional and simplified Chinese. It follows the winding journey of three members — Chen Keng, Nathalie Stirnimann, and Stefan Stojanovic — sailing by boat from Xiamen toward Shuangkou coast in Kinmen, in search of Liu Wen-Chi. The straight-line distance on a map is just 6.1 kilometers; in the script, the characters spend far longer than expected circling endlessly at sea. Amid constantly interrupted phone calls, imprecise satellite positioning, and even a fortune-teller’s prophecy on the dock, those aboard the boat ultimately fail to reach the other shore, and can only make each other out from a distance through fireworks that Wen-Chi sets off on Kinmen island. In one corner of the theater sits a map, stitching together traditional and simplified Chinese versions — pointing to how meeting and communicating with one another has never been as easy as it might seem. What it points to is not only the gap between writing systems, but the deeper difficulty of reconciling entirely different systems of understanding.
The performance unfolds through the members’ fraught journey to meet across the strait, and that repeatedly obstructed meeting is itself the question the group poses: how do we connect with one another? Connection, they suggest, is also structural — it shapes the very fabric of people’s lives. Nathalie believes that precisely because people rarely have the chance to communicate directly, it becomes all the more necessary to see through layers of imagination, projection, and bias in order to truly see one another. Wen-Chi noted that this process often relies on trust between people, requiring one to cross deep individual boundaries in order to ask questions of the other. Chen Keng added that the forces that shape our lives can be vast, but it can equally exist between just two people, embedded in the small details of daily life — exerting an influence that is easy to overlook yet impossible to ignore, much like the pack of Double Happiness cigarettes, the hot air balloon, or the sudden recollection of the song “The Moon Represents My Heart” that appear in the performance — all of them vessels for the imaginings and projections people hold toward those far away.
In the video, Chen Keng, Nathalie Stirnimann, and Stefan Stojanovic stand on the shore of Xiamen. Video still from Wen Keng We Meet? – On Connection by RRRRRR Collective © RRRRRR Collective
Small things, it turns out, can also become starting points for creation. Faced with differences and obstacles that cannot be fully overcome, RRRRRR Collective responds by creating. In a present moment where communication grows increasingly difficult and public discourse drifts toward polarization, this too is a kind of answer they offer. For them, this performance is less a finished statement than a letter — a way of looking back on the years since 2018 — and they chose fiction deliberately, to leave room for imagining the future. Eneas Prawdzic recalled that back in Hong Kong, they had already developed a particular working method: invent a game, place themselves inside it, and tell a story according to its rules. In this piece, they created a situation in which meeting, connecting, and messaging all become nearly impossible — and the characters, driven by the sheer will to see one another again, strain to listen through noise, glitches, and malfunction. Fiction, in turn, gives everyone — audience included — the space to witness their differences, and to concretely feel just how difficult communication really is.
Can a form of communication like this sustain itself in a healthy way over time? Nathalie Stirnimann and Chen Keng both said, almost in unison, that their sense of communication was never naively optimistic — and in Eneas Prawdzic’s eyes, the world seems to be moving toward something bleaker. “But there’s always a thread of hope.” Nathalie believes this connection requires careful tending in order to survive. Still, the members admit they don’t know how long the group can continue, or when their next collaboration might come. Precisely because they live in such different realities, constantly on the move and never settled, Liu Wen-Chi said this is exactly what reminds her to stay in touch as much as possible, and to keep trying to make something together.
In one corner of the theater sits a map stitched together from traditional and simplified Chinese versions, showing how each side interprets and understands the same geographic region differently. In the middle of the Taiwan Strait sits a small paper boat, folded from newspaper. Video still from Wen Keng We Meet? – On Connection by RRRRRR Collective © RRRRRR Collective
At the very end of the performance, amid a heavy snowfall over Zurich, the members each turn in a different direction and blow into bird whistles that Liu Wen-Chi brought from Taipei. The sound rings out both in the snow-covered video footage and, at the same moment, live in the theater. This is the space RRRRRR Collective builds through the story they tell, at a time when the conditions for ideal communication feel ever more out of reach. Within it, people seem, for a moment, able to overcome distances that felt impossible to cross — to hear one another. And yet, hearing one another has never been easy; it always demands more patience than we expect. —[SCR]
Header Imae: Video still from Wen Keng We Meet? – On Connection by RRRRRR Collective © RRRRRR Collective
