by Jonathan Ali
In Statues Sing Silence, eight films interrogate and reflect on the architectures, uncertainties and possibilities of labour – in its extractive, everyday and speculative forms.
Eva Giolo’s The Demands of Ordinary Devotion is an associative study of creation in various forms, where meaning is conveyed through accumulated movements and sounds, the repetition of the physical forming a vital link across a series of disparate protagonists. Jack Guariento’s essay film Bellsmyre Caledonia takes as its starting point the way work and leisure were distorted during the pandemic, then considers how an expansion in time led to an increase in the potential for critical thought and subsequent politicised action.
Moving across the Black Atlantic to bridge the distance between London and Nassau, both of whose streets were de-peopled by the pandemic, Rhea Storr’s polyvocal Through a Shimmering Prism, We Made a Way reflects on the presence and absence of Black bodies in movement in the public space, and on feminine diasporic identity and being. Distances of various kinds are reckoned with in Elizabeth M. Webb’s Proximity Study (Sight Lines). The film gazes from the artist’s perspective across the water upon the Brooklyn docks, where her grandfather, a migrant from the Jim Crow South, once worked, in an analogue attempt to engender closeness through memories of a man she never met.
In a similarly poignant act, Yanbin Zhao’s Train Song manipulates film stock to distort landscape images, the work seeking to conjure the spectres of Chinese immigrant labourers who built California’s railroads. The ghostly images in blurry found VHS footage form the material basis of Martyna Ratnik’s May You Live In Interesting Times, a speculative historical document reflecting on the possibly lost futures of the failed Moscow coup of August 1991, through a manifesto written by a group of Lithuanian youths.
The silent echoes of time passing by abound in FACE HOME VIEW, in which Raquel Vermunt’s camera makes an elaborate unbroken movement through an empty workspace, revealing an unseen range of human activity. Finally, in What Could Happen Here?, Hope London and Daniel Hughes collaborate with the people of Stranraer, Scotland: live-action footage, still images, illustration and animation blend in a utopian imagining of the possibilities for the town’s regeneration.
