RESIDUAL

Dual screen installation

“Examining how decaying objects accumulate deeper historical and spiritual significance, Residual is a great example of content echoing context”
Metro press, Bristol, U.K

WATCH FILM PREVIEW - GO TO PROJECT SITE (archive site from 2005)


Residual looks at our feeling of place and time in its most stripped down state: simply ‘being’. Hovering on the borders of consciousness, at once an unearthing and a burial of meaning, Residual is devoid of both event and human presence. Drawing on the archaeology of Bristol’s presence (underground tunnels, urban construction, port activity) this diptych pays homage to the forgotten: the abandoned, the eroded, the no longer visible.

If one listens to a space, a building, a landscape, there is often a feeling of residue, of accumulated time, of events which are somehow held in secrecy. Time and erosion seem to increase the feeling of a site: as though the absence of matter heightens its presence. Like the weight that we feel when we are in front of a ruin: the presence of the disappeared.

Residual looks at place as locus, a holding space for the actings of time and event. The ‘this happened here’ is approached in a post-factual manner by focusing on a location’s psyche; its latent history, its projected identity, and especially the resulting resonance on the viewer or experiencer of that place. The film, then, aims to offer a space for that empathetic connection, that deeply resonant experience; the meeting point between human psyche and location psyche.

The film  uses a grammar based on dual image/ sound juxtaposition, cross dissolves and overlays, where the movement mainly arises through the relationships and progressive ebb and flow of the edit rather than an active subject or visible event within the frame. Through its durational insistence, the image permeates consciousness reaching what lies subjacent.


Residual is screened in installation context (dual channel) or as split screen (cinema).
A chapter on residual has been published in Electric Pavilion, Ed. Tiger Prawn, U.K 2006
Commissioned by Watershed Media Centre and Bristol City Council for Creative Bristol, funded by Arts Council England.