by Rachael Disbury
In Music On A Farm Was A Rare Thing, seven films probe the constructs of image-making in relation to ownership, authorship, framing and power.
In A Letter to Time, Katie Somers, Seb Lord, River Uhing and Esmé Babineaux – four participants of Alchemy’s creative learning programme Film Town, facilitated here by Lydia Beilby and Sana Bilgrami as part of Folk Film Gathering – use photochemical film as a tool for creating archival documents for the future, reflecting on place, community and personal identity.
Hope Strickland’s I’LL BE BACK! interrupts conceptions of time, moving fluidly between myth and recorded history, fabulation and institutional power, digital and analogue techniques. Strickland meditates on colonialism, resistance and Black metamorphosis, complicating practices of museum cataloguing with an exploration of the transubstantiation of Haitian Maroon leader François Mackandal into a fly at his 1758 execution. Misrepresentation and colonial fantasies within archival practices are also critically examined in Silhouettes Remain, in which Maya Jeffereis traces the origin of harmful stereotyping of Asian women across paintings, archive footage, museum interpretation materials and mainstream media.
In MAN MADE, Elian Mikkola creates a surreal narrative questioning gender performance and expectation. Mikkola manipulates, repeats, freezes and lingers on existing film frames to create a stuttering, uncanny tale revealing the absurdities of historical ideas of masculinity. In Laura Ohio’s Hello, Whale, a sex worker reflects on the intersections of work, life, love, and survival through the diaristic cornerstones of encounters with three distinct versions of a whale. Ohio’s gentle pace and contemplative gaze allow for observations on the entanglements between bodies and the systemic pressures of late capitalism.
maud., by Natasha Thembiso Ruwona, addresses systemic failings, focusing on Black, queer and female erasure. Through conversations with Black artists working in Scotland, the film compiles a portrait and understanding of the largely undercelebrated practice of multi-disciplinary Scottish-Ghanaian artist Maud Sulter.
In Waiting for the Buff to Rub Me Out, Allana James and Mark Lyken explore the obstacles of maintaining platforms for expression in an age of sterile surveillance. Through the fictionalised portrait of Shadow, a Scottish trans femme graffiti writer, issues of erasure are made literal through a deceptively playful cat-and-mouse between the protagonist and an official in Hi-Viz.
