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In 1953, Claire Leven traveled to Florence, Italy to study the lost-wax process of sculpting. After her passing in 2021, her granddaughter decided to do the same, embarking on a journey to discover more about her grandmother’s mysterious artistic past. Through visiting places of importance and by participating in the embodied practice of sculpting, granddaughter and grandmother become beautifully intertwined through memory, grief, and art.
related works
Haraka Baraka
Exploring diaspora and migration dynamics, this film follows my parents’ return to their homeland in Iraqi Kurdistan after having lived in the Netherlands for over 20 years. It is as much about the reshaping of normative frameworks as it is about my parents’ relationship, which I approach in a self-reflexive manner.
Video
MA
2014
Breaking Tezcatlipoca
As a graphic ethnography of Mexican family stories, this comic book is an overview of a family mythos about (great-)grandparents and the multiple ways in which family members conceptualise memory and perceive reality through family storytelling. Working within the realms of auto-ethnography, comics theory and the recent so-called “graphic narrative turn” in Anthropology, this project attempts to bring together a partial view of multiple perspectives in order to render visible the ambivalent and uncertain realities of Mexican family myths.
Graphic
MA
2019
The Yayas de l’Elegance
S.A.P.E is the acronym for the Society of Ambience Makers and Elegant People. The followers of this movement call themselves sapeurs, men devoted to elegant dressing. SAPE becomes a performed experience encompassing a world of meanings and symbols.
Video
MA
2012
One more cup of coffee for ambe’
This ethnographic film explores the unique approached to death among Torajan People of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. It contrasts the funerary practices of two families who adhere to Aluk to Dolo belief system and who have recently converted to Christianity – one middle class and one upper class – both deeply devoted to honouring the deceased fathers.
Video
MA
2024
A Home Made Strange
After my father, Ian, suffered two brain hemorrhages in 2012, the world as he knew it became completely transformed. He faces long-term neurological problems related to speech, memory, comprehension and fatigue. In the film we explore how his relationships with people and everyday life has changed, how he actively continues to make sense of his new perceptual and imaginative world.
Video
MA
2016
Inside The Wood
Aaron Keydar has been creating wood sculptures in the Spanish island of Formentera for more than forty years. Inside The Wood explores Aaron’s life-memories through the place where he lives and the surfaces and textures of the Mediterranean landscape.
Video
MA
2014
In Touch
Centring the daughter’s experience, In Touch follows and examines three complex mother-daughter relationships from three distinct cultural settings that share one commonality: a daughter who has studied and, crucially, chosen to remain abroad. Independence, groundlessness, possibilities: experiences indicative of the emerging adult reality.
Video
MA
2022
Sich Abhängen | Holding On
Using an old dollhouse as a visual metaphor for refurnishing the memories of her life, the film follows Lisbeth Svenson (my grandmother) and her son Anders Runesson (my father) as they begin to explore the impacts of grief as it reverberates through a family in the south of Sweden.
Video
MA
2022
Yours Truly
Yours Truly follows the trail of taxidermic pieces collected during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by The Manchester Museum. Letters between its directors, explorers, and lords unveil the stories of specimens that act as uncomfortable reminders of past scientific and colonial procedures.
Video
MA
2017
I’m Lee not Emily
An ethnofictional film on inhabiting a trans and disabled body while navigating queer polyamory, community care, and imagination. Set against the backdrop of a transphobic healthcare system and the rising tides of fascism in the UK, the film follows Lee, as an abundance of love shared among partners begins to fracture under the weight of mental health struggles imposed by systemic neglect.
Video
MA
2025