My work tackles relationships between form and politics, with a particular interest in the aesthetics of coexistence: what are the underlying forms which structure our everyday existence, and what do new social formations look like?
Across all my work there is an attention to subjectivity and how it is formed: by architecture, politics, landscape and history. I’m motivated by the question of how things could be otherwise. How does a particular form, or practice, allow for life to be lived differently? How do we conceive of individual and collective freedoms? What are the forces which constrain us?
My work sits within a nonfiction framework, drawing on histories of documentary filmmaking, artists’ moving image and essay film. I frequently collaborate with others, believing that filmmaking has the potential to engender new relationships and offers a way out of individualistic modes of production. In these collaborations I occupy different positions, rejecting the hierarchy of traditional film sets in favour of a discursive mode of making that prioritises negotiation and co-creation over ideas of documentary objectivity. I keep in mind that the camera is an active participant in any film.
Sound also plays an important role in my work, often leading the image, and I’m interested in its role as a carrier of history through music and oral traditions, and the way that it occupies the emotional core of audio-visual works. For me, recording sound is primarily about paying attention to place, and all of the human and non-human actors which make up a sense of place. Like the camera, the microphone is a subjective, musical tool.
My long-term collaboration with Marta Hryniuk has seen me work extensively in Ukraine, and over the past few years this has become a more complex relationship, involving activist and humanitarian work, and further blurring the line between artistic and other types of work.
