OUR SHAPE APPARENTLY

Alchemy Film & Arts

Using film as a way to come together, have conversations and strengthen community.

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HEART OF HAWICK
FRIDAY 29 APRIL
12:00 – 13:30 / 73’ + Q&A

Autojektor, Abi Lewis, Morisha Moodley, George Finlay Ramsay and Toby Tatum will be present for the Q&A.

This programme is captioned.

Content warning: some flashing imagery; depictions of nudity, distressing audio, loud noises.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Kerry Jones

The 13 films in this programme discover and articulate the plural and shapeshifting ways in which being and place interconnect. The programme begins with 42 seconds of audiovisual intensity: Autojektor’s Basilisk, in which a terrifying forest is experienced through a mutated artificial eye/lens. The monochrome trees of Carlos Nahuel Cerutti’s Vivant create a different woodland setting, as a faceless animated figure interacts with its surroundings.

In Wyssolela Moreira’s Unlayered, close-ups of a moving body are containerised and collaged across screen in an interplay of shadow and light, and of contours that are simultaneously abstract and direct. In Nate Dorr’s Light Leak, light itself is a recording, an echo, a memory, as experiences of an increasingly unreal, unconnected outside world are internalised.

Nicole Ucedo’s People, Views and People’s Views presents street scenes of Los Angeles from multiple viewpoints, deploying 16mm textures, digital overlays of text-based ruminations in English and Spanish, and audio field recordings from public transport to map out a topology of the artist’s hometown. The co-existence of obscure, interconnected, interdependent, digitally-drawn transient beings in Rae-Yen Song’s animated short wūûūwūûū suggests a rich and mutating ecosystem, a shapeshifting vision of worlds within worlds, of harmonies within disharmony: live, eat, sleep, die, mutate, live…

Questions of death and what remains of us are woven into a story that doesn’t have to do with me, Kymberly McDaniel’s intimate foray into her partner’s feminist and queer research in the realm of bioarchaeology. Toby Tatum’s transcendental The Visitation is a single scene of magnified, iridescent bubbles drifting through a prism – its durational spectres of light playing out in contrast to the pulses of light that punctuate Tetsuya Maruyama’s Antfilm, a mesmeric and rhythmic display of phantom memory.

In George Finlay Ramsay’s 16mm essay film CASTOROCENE, a more mythical creature rebuilds a post-human ecosystem, sculpting a textural, tactile world framed by – and as – a poetic narrative. Navigating human and social notions of gender, Morisha Moodley’s commes tous les garçons asks what it means to be like all the boys. An assemblage of animation, found footage and personal archives pieces together queer identities from myriad perspectives.

Ayla Dmyterko’s Rite of Return reactivates folkloric themes of dance, desire, death and a Ukrainian healing ritual of pouring forth the fear, connecting memoirs and intersectional dialogues in a way that is deeply rhythmic and visually unique. Closing the programme, Abi Lewis’s Muttsnek returns us to audiovisual intensities: a final animated battle between introvert and extrovert – an unresolved dialogue on loop.

PROGRAMME