WELCOME > SCHEDULE > EXHIBITIONS > A RIVER HOLDS A PERFECT MEMORY

HERITAGE HUB
THURSDAY 1 – SUNDAY 4 MAY
10:00 – 17:00 / 17′ (looped)

Content warning: contains sustained intense sound, discussion of classism, colonialism. 

FREE ENTRY

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

Hope Strickland returns to Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival with a simultaneously tender and radical film that teases out diasporic connections across apparently disparate geographies. Knowingly meandering in nature, a river holds a perfect memory is an essay film of equally varied form, encompassing archival stills and film, 16mm footage shot by the artist, LIDAR scans, voiceover and hauntingly absorbing music.

Strickland’s film opens with footage and intertitles from a silent-era documentary charting Lancashire’s growth during the industrial revolution. Soon after, the film switches registers, with sound recordings and colour analogue cinematography of what is revealed to be Jamaica: its Martha Brae River and the luminous lagoon in Falmouth on the country’s north coast. Later, shots of the region’s Persian waterwheel, built at the end of the eighteenth century to transport water between the river and town, are juxtaposed with sequences depicting the construction of a reservoir in twentieth-century Lancashire.

Shifting effortlessly and intriguingly between these temporalities, locales and forms, the artist accrues a connective framework in which water itself emerges as an agentic force, a repository of ancestral memory. A river is posited here as a construction: the result of labour and an industrial-scale manipulation of land. As if to adopt the boundless character of water, the film’s essayistic components begin to give way to something more lyrical, non-verbal: a montage in which images are fleeting and associative, arguments are cinematic and sensual rather than literary or literal, systems of knowledge are plural and complementary.

Everything flows. Exhibited here within touching distance of where Hawick’s own rivers meet, and of the town’s own waterwheel beneath the café of former mill building Heart of Hawick, a river holds a perfect memory is a quietly propulsive work, always moving onward even as it appears to look back. In this sense, Strickland approximates the two-way flow of a waterway’s tidal stretch. Just as a river flows wherever its valley allows, the film itself goes and takes you where its material demands. And just as a river meets the sea, even at the film’s most site-sensitive and historically specific moments, it reaches for and achieves things that can’t easily be felt.