Running time: 5 minutes of 21:14:00 (full running time)
ghosted matter. Video work shown at Gallery25, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia, as part of the ghosted matter/phantom hurt (and other chimera) installation, 2-22 July, and as part of the disquieting domesticities/vestiges of violence (regenerations) installation. Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, 30 September-10 December 2021.
This video was the first work in which I extended my use of material biomaterials into the digital realm. It comprises footage of the impressions made from biofibre. In their filmic iterations, the scale of the life-sized impressions is magnified or distorted. They appear as strange, ethereal landscapes or as floating on the undefined white ground, slipping in and out of the frame. As video is a medium in which the transientness of light, time and space is foregrounded, both the landscapes and suspended forms emphasise the ephemeral nature of the material matter, conveying a heightened sense of weightlessness, immateriality and fragility.
As Verne Harris, writing about the archive puts it, “For the fragments in their custody comprise matter out of place. And the whispers of dislocation can be heard. Ghostly voices of other places, of lineages, of origins”.
Harris, V. 2015. Hauntology, archivy and banditry: an engagement with Derrida and Zapiro. Critical Arts 29(1):13-27; page 20.
