Texture of the Current, 2022

Inspired by the docklands section of the Century of Artists' Film in Britain programme curated by the archives founder, David Curtis, we went to the docklands to collect our own archive of materials to arrange in the gallery. In a similar way that the study archive is simply an ordering of David Curtis’s findings in film and video and stands to represent the presence and absence of the body, we aim to link to the organic ecologies present in film and in the found materialities of mudlarking in the docklands.

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The found remnants (bones, forks, tools etc) are evidence of the use and activation of the figure, and are displayed with a backdrop of banana leaves that works both as a testimony of processes of ageing and as a visual illusion implying a physical connection with the Collection, archived behind.  Film acts as an act of transportation of one body in time and space, projected into another. We are considering the current of the Thames as a vehicle that transports physical traces into our current timespace. The archive is a place where time is slowed, compressed and immobilised, while time has passed since the docklands videos were created, some of the objects we found predate that era and were possibly lost during that era. Through this installation we hope to express that compression of time. Can the gesture of configuring objects work as a lost film ?