OMA OMA OMA

OMA OMA OMA is an animated documentary portraying the life of the artist’s grandmother through fragments of memory, storytelling, and emotional reconstruction.

Combining analog and digital animation techniques, the film moves between documentary material, autobiographical narration, and symbolic visual sequences to construct a melancholic portrait shaped by labour, love, gender roles, sexuality, and aging. Rather than attempting to produce a linear biography, the work approaches memory as fragmented, affective, and continuously transformed through narration.

The project marks an important transition within the artist’s practice: a movement away from exclusively analog filmmaking towards hybrid methodologies combining documentary research, animation, sound, and autobiographical storytelling.

At the same time, the film introduces a method that later reappears in works such as The Voices of my Neighbours: the translation of lived experience and oral narration into animated and performative visual forms.

Process

The project emerged through conversations, memories, family archives, and autobiographical reflection surrounding the life and death of the artist’s grandmother.

Working between analog and digital techniques, the artist combined animation, documentary material, narration, and visual experimentation to construct a film oscillating between intimacy and fiction. Rather than illustrating memories directly, animation becomes a method for translating emotional states, absences, and difficult narratives into moving images.

The hybrid process allowed documentary narration to coexist with symbolic and subjective visual structures, opening a space in which personal history could be emotionally reconstructed rather than historically fixed.

Through this methodology, animation shifts from pure cinematic experimentation towards a relational and narrative tool capable of carrying lived experience, memory, and voice.

Forms

Animated documentary film: a hybrid moving-image work combining analog and digital animation with autobiographical narration and documentary elements Hybrid animation techniques — a combination of handmade and digital processes translating memory, oral storytelling, and emotional states into moving images Sound and narration — autobiographical and documentary voice structures accompanying the visual reconstruction of memory and family history

These forms operate together as a fragmented emotional portrait in which animation functions as a tool for narration, translation, and mourning.

Context

Produced after the films later gathered under Fragile Narratives, OMA OMA OMA marks a decisive transition from analog stop-motion experimentation towards hybrid documentary and narrative methodologies.

The film was presented internationally in film festival contexts, including the Shanghai International Film Festival.

Within the artist’s trajectory, the project occupies an important position as an early work in which autobiographical voice, oral history, and lived experience begin to structure the moving image directly.