The Wooden Building Will Be Left for the Angel’s Revenge (2026) is the second film from the series Conversations: Architecture, a new segment of the long-term Conversations project, based on audio-recorded interviews with children from around the world. In this work, the voices of children from San Francisco enter into dialogue with the historical site of the Angel Island Immigration Station.

Filmed inside a former immigration detention barrack, the work places contemporary children’s voices in resonance with poetic inscriptions engraved by Chinese detainees at the turn of the twentieth century. Architecture functions as a layered temporal archive in which intimate testimony unsettles institutional memory, transforming the building into a site where competing temporalities coexist without reconciliation.

Through the acousmatic presence of children’s voices—detached from the body yet anchored in space—the film reactivates the silent narratives embedded within the structure. The work reflects on displacement, memory, and the persistence of voices across time, allowing past and present to intersect without closure.

*The work was commissioned by Independent Curators International (ICI)  and realized with the support of the Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport, Republic of Austria (BMWKMS), and the City of Vienna Culture Department (Stadt Wien Kultur).

Music and Sound Design – Marija Balubdžić
Cinematography – Amanda Law
Editing – Dejan Kaludjerović & Andrej Ostroški
Research and Script – Dejan Kaludjerović & Sanja Grozdanić
Cantonese and Mandarin Voice-over – Deng Yeming 

Children from San Francisco who shared their stories  – Athena, Emme, Niko, Nicodemus, Quinn, Ramona, Regina

The script is based on interviews with children from San Francisco, California, conducted by Dejan Kaludjerović in June 2025 as part of the Conversations project, which he has been producing since 2013.