The snow is starting to fall and I am cold. It is early and London is still in lockdown. The sky is grey like the concrete at the Barbican. I look and try to find angles and shapes that feel the way I do - desperate and slightly lost. I usually take photographs here, but today I am taking 10-second clips. Instead of the click of the shutter, it’s the ‘start’ and ‘stop’ of a silent virtual button. The snow is still falling and I am still cold.
The sun is shining and everything is bathed in golden light. The leaves are green and it smells like summer. Lockdown in has eased, but there still aren’t that many people around. Perhaps it’s too early in the day, or maybe people are still unsure how to reintegrate into a new version of normality? I revisit all of the places that I walked through a few months ago. Things seem different - not better, just different. I compose the scene, record the clip, and move on. It is still warm.
The video for Ben Lukas Boysen’s rework of Fallen is a balance between two contrasting halves.
The video is meant to evoke memories of a place that was beautiful but also fragmented. Like with all home videos, the scenes doesn’t accurately represent a moment, but rather act as triggers. Moving from footage of nature in the city to being underground, the video could suggest a dystopian mindset, but it is more about transience and hope for another place that feels ‘right’.
For Cemëpka, I wanted to move away from the conventions of a rectangular video format. The circle could be a planet or a porthole. The footage comes from old films of space travel and includes footage of Belka and Strelka. While their influence on space travel is undoubtedly an important one, subsequent developments in rocket technology also have more sinister undertones.
For Caroline’s Present, the footage is all transcoded from 8mm footage found on an online auction site. I was interested in the the nostalgia of old 8mm footage, but also how someone would be willing to part with it. Perhaps the people in the footage were forgotten, or it found in an attic during a house move? The footage shows happiness, but there is a bittersweet undertone to all of it.