Tacita Dean The Uncles

Sean Borodale & Louisa Fairclough
Cattle Market Song

Jayne Parker Stationary Music

Dominic Thomas Retreat

Place Memory
Friday 22th June 8pm
Saturday 23rd June 4pm

A two-part event of video screenings, 16mm film projection and performance brings together internationally recognised film-makers with artists from Stroud and the South West. Performance is central to much of the work: walking backwards as a way of remembering; re-enacting the painting of a wall onto the projected image; playing the piano as an act of remembrance. Many of the films use song or music: a film with live accompaniment on the saxophone; poetry set to song as the starting point for a sequence of short films.

From digital archive to recollections recorded on film, this event explores ideas of memory and its association with place.

Curated by Louisa Fairclough

Place Memory (Place)
Friday 22nd June 8pm

Winterreise by Mariele Neudecker was made in collaboration with Opera North. The twenty-four short films were shot in locations on the sixtieth degree of latitude in response to Schubert’s song cycle: a tale of unrequited love, despair and travel into a frozen landscape

From the diminished engagement with place that occurs through web cam technology, Susan Collins’ Glenlandia paradoxically creates profoundly beautiful images of Loch Faskally, the landscape slowly shifting as the image accumulates a pixel per second. (Showing over both days of the event.)

Phil Coy’s Cataract takes us on a journey through the glossy images and saccharine language of estate agents and property developers. The view drifts through a landscape of perfection, the broken narration dictating a language of never-ending potential.

Simon Ryder’s Market Report chronicles the Foot and Mouth crisis with a softly spoken monologue set against the hand-held video image of a burning landscape.

In Dominic Thomas’ Retreat, a nostalgia for place is the catalyst for his performance to camera. Inaccessible byroad, he treks across hills to revisit a remote farmhouse in the Lake District: walking backwards as an act of remembering.

Place Memory (Memory)
Saturday 23rd June 4pm

Tacita Dean is well known for her compelling 16mm films and more recently her series of film portraits. The Uncles documents a conversation between her two uncles who recollect their fathers, Basil Dean and Michael Balcon, and their involvement in the early days of the Ealing Studios.

Jayne Parker’s Stationary Music features the pianist, Katharina Wolpe playing her father Stefan Wolpe’s music which she prefaces with a short introduction. The film was awarded the ARTE Prize at the 51st International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen 2005.

In No More Painting, Colin Glen reenacts the painting of a wall, his projected image a memory-mould into which he, the artist, attempts to cast his physical presence. In Glen’s transformation from artist-painter to painter-decorator, he hints at Marcel Duchamp’s statement:‘Marcel, no more painting, go get a job’.

A process of remembering and transcribing is central to Cattle Market Song by Sean Borodale & Louisa Fairclough; with live accompaniment by Tim Hill on the saxophone, the film documents the rituals and social gestures of a livestock market.