DID SUCH A WORLD EVER EXIST

Alchemy Film & Arts

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

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HEART OF HAWICK
SATURDAY 3 MAY
14:30 – 16:00 / 65′ + Q&A

Jolene Mok, Arjuna Keshvani-Ham, Shi Yun Teo, Michael Hanna, Beth Fox, Olive Jones, Charlie Black and Esme Haddrill Selman will be present for the Q&A.

The films in this programme have descriptive subtitles. The introduction and Q&A will have BSL interpretation.

Content warning: contains flashing imagery, sustained intense sound, strong language; discussion of displacement, colonialism, poverty, classism, eating disorders, climate anxiety, ableism; depiction of insects, animal carcasses.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by april forrest lin 林森

In Did Such A World Ever Exist, nine films examine work and the city as sites upon which public and private realms are formed and contested.

In an inimitable place called home, Jolene Mok juxtaposes multiple modalities of gliding through Hong Kong; an analogue deliberation on scale and the everyday that guides us through the city’s transportational meridians. Arjuna Keshvani-Ham’s Radicle City continues this psychogeographic inquiry by means of speculative documentary, as a nameless narrator from a future where Bangalore’s gardens no longer exist continues to disentangle remnant legacies of British colonialism.

Shi Yun Teo’s spaces as traces is an interdisciplinary multimedia survey into Singaporean domestic and communal space, injecting a science fictive interpretation of Chinese folklore to parse its spiritual, technological and architectural threads. The city as container for multiple worlds resurfaces in Michael Hanna’s Once a Blue Always a Red, in which a Liverpool taxicab becomes the social laboratory for the artist’s unthinkable experiment in changing his footballing allegiances.

Criss-crossing through urban veins, we also find Beth Fox, whose 12 Lemons: Further Adventures from the Gig Economy chronicles her time working as a bike rider for Deliveroo during the COVID-19 pandemic – a humorous and transparent picture-in-picture exposé of neoliberalism’s underbelly. Olive Jones’s See and Don’t See is a chimerical and collaborative portrait of single motherhood that features a soundscape of the body and placenta, destabilising conventional representations of pregnancy and fixed dichotomies of inside/outside.

Charlie Black’s Losing Touch uses footage gathered over a 24-hour period in Berlin to de-romanticise the natural and re-enchant the urban, reflecting an internal conversation reckoning with ecological destruction and its resulting emotional aftermath. In Sara Wylie’s Resistance Meditation, time is once more reappropriated by necessity as crip time, a continuous act of resistance against the disciplinary and disabling aspects of capitalist time.

In Our Millions, by Meli Vasiloudes Bayada, Ally Lloyd and Esme Haddrill Selman, closes the programme with a protest. Filmed in November 2023 at a march in solidarity with Palestine, it is a silent work that loudly proclaims the streets as a site where participation and comradeship can urgently and fervently come alive.

PROGRAMME