by Jonathan Ali
From a defiant gesture of material memorialising to the speculative post-conflict queering of warzone rubble, the five films in this programme use the cinematic image to trace, map, preserve and amplify the absences, aftershocks of trauma.
In Niyaz Saghari’s Ripple Effect, found digital video of an Iranian political activist diving into a pool is recaptured on Super 8 film – then decelerated and repeated, the camera and the processes of image-reproduction becoming a means of magnification, grieving, and galvanising remembrance in the wake of his execution by the state.
In Zipped Up Blues, Matthew Burdis activates memory through images, as some seemingly unremarkable found photographs, road atlases and Oor Wullie illustrations lead the filmmaker’s father to recall, in compellingly digressive and at times touching testimony, his work as an officer for Northumbria Police, which included searching for the wreckage in 1988 of Pan Am Flight 103 – the Boeing 707 passenger jet destroyed by a bomb while at 31,000 feet over Lockerbie.
Seemingly unremarkable landscape footage hides historical colonialist violence in Katarzyna Łukasik’s No One Will Shed Tears for the Sovereign Figure 1 of 3, a literally and metaphorically layered meditation on the destruction of Eastern Orthodox churches by the Second Polish Republic – and an affectingly tactile gesture towards recreating an erased archive.
Colonialism, archival hegemony, and an attempt to reclaim an appropriated history of resistance interweave in the ethnographic fiction of Caroline Déodat’s Under The Sky Of Fetishes. Narrating a story concerning sega, a dance form that emerged among fugitive communities during slavery on the island of Mauritius, the work proceeds from the monochromatic and silent to the full-colour, full-throated and transcendent.
Finally, in Chantal Partamian’s Traces, queer feminine desire overthrows a militarised patriarchal order, through a provocative and electronically scored comingling of different sets of glitchy, abstracted, and disintegrated found footage.
