Awarded the Plymouth-Nicosia Artist Residency with Stuart Moore, hosted by Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC, Associated with the Pierides Foundation), Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus, from 7 November to 5 December 2016, to research and undertake principal filming for a collaborative moving image project entitled ‘Father-land: (re)visiting the past’; followed by a further residency period from 27 March to 3 April 2018 to make sound recordings and additional filming on locationProposal
This project provides the opportunity to develop a new collaborative work, a poetic essay film, through practice-based research on location in Cyprus, where both our late fathers were stationed with the Royal Air Force during the Cold War. Using digital and film-based technologies we will explore our relationship to place and ‘lost fathers’, drawing on memories of a militarised nomadic childhood and located the context of an island whose turbulent human histories extend to the Neolithic.
The self-reflective and self-reflexive hybridity of the essay film “disrespects traditional boundaries, is transgressive both structurally and conceptually” (Alter, 1996: 171). It allows us to interweave personal and social histories with subjective and intellectual perspectives, situated in contemporary experience. The essay film form blurs traditional boundaries of documentary and fiction; we can “debate a problem by using all the means that the cinema affords, all the registers and all the expedients” (Morin in Rascaroli, 2008: 39).
Relationship to practice
Our collaboration forms an important strand of practice and has produced distinctive moving image artworks such as: Teign Spirit (2009) an Animate Projects commission for Sea Change, the 360 artists’ moving image festival Welcome to the Treasuredome (2012) for the Cultural Olympiad, in addition to Reach (2014), commissioned by The River Tamar Project, and Project for the Lux Centre launch (1997) The four week residency allowed us time to venture into unexplored regions of shared but separate histories and to create a work of complexity and depth.
Technical details
The residency will output digital audiovisual work/s including an essay film.
Father-land: filming on location at the abandoned Nicosia International Airport, UN Buffer Zone
References
Nora Alter (1996) ‘The political im/perceptible in the essay film’ New German Critique Issue 68 (Spring/Summer 1996).
Laura Rascaroli (2008) ‘The Essay film: problems, definitions, textual commitments’ Framework Vol. 49 No. 2 (Fall 2008). pp. 24-47. Translated by Rascaroli from the original Italian in Giovanni Maderna (1996/2008) ‘Film saggio: Intervista a Edgar Morin’ p.4 in Silvano Cavatorta and Luca Mosso (eds.) Filmmaker 5 Doc. Milan: Edizioni A&M.
