Spectres, Skin and Bone (2025)

Live Audiovisual Performance/Experimental Lecture, B&W, Sound

Since its inception cinema has been likened to a 'kingdom of shadows'; time frozen, a netherworld between life, death and memory. 'Spectres, Skin and Bone' is an audiovisual presentation that discusses the deathly materiality of photochemical objects to explore themes around mortality, memorial, extinction, extraction and decay. It encompasses postmortem and spirit photography, Thai cemetery cinema, the gelatine of film emulsion as a charnel house of countless carcasses and the Arctic World Archive where digital data is backed up to 35mm film: a haunted tomb of contemporary knowledge. It is accompanied by my reanimations of long-expired reels as mutant assemblages, depicting film as both wounded skin and membrane between the material realm and the ether; flickering traces of lives, systems, and worlds disappearing before our eyes.

The accompanying sound is from the project Light Sensitive Materials - made from sonifying decaying film reels, dredging sounds from the cracked surface of the celluloid.

Performances:

The Old Market, Hove, part of the night Oblivion (October 2025)

Exploding Cinema at the Cinema Museum, London