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In Upper Takutu – Upper Essequibo, Guyana, during the rainy season, rivers burst their banks and the forest floods. An infant is bathed through repetitive splashing, weighed and measured; cassava is harvested from swiddens and carried to houses. They Are Not Yet Grown dwells in these seemingly ordinary scenes, foregrounding the affective and sensuous knowledge of Makushi women’s intimate, everyday lives. Taking partiality and proximity as both constraint and opening, it traces the alignment of bodies, tools, and substances through which toxic tuberous roots are transformed into nourishing foods.
related works
Grandma’s Hands
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.
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
The Skein Her Very Skin
This project, guided by expert craftswomen within Manchester’s quilting circles, uses textiles as a creative methodology to explore the often-overlooked and underappreciated world of women’s work, illuminating the values, relationships, memories, and meanings hidden and observed in the material. It frames the quilt as a materialisation of women lives, contemplating questions of skill, temporality and identity.
Performance, Photography
MA
2018
Imagining Islam
This study explores an Islam envisioned by a specific reform movement that aims to refashion Islamic identity through aesthetic practice. I argue that fragmented communities can experience moments of unity through the creation of a shared sensory experience. Through this, pious arts in the UK are contributing to the creation of a moral space that does not oppose Islam and the West but reconciles divisions through the enchanted self.
Sound
MA
2012
Dancing in Pott Shrigley
This experimental installation film explores Environmental Dance as a way of engaging nature through movement. Made in collaboration with Dr. Gemma Collard-Stokes to be an installation piece, this film documents Gemma’s interactions with various spaces within what used to be a coal mine in Pott Shrigley, Macclesfield.
Sound, Video
MA
2021
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
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
Life Lived in Colour
This project explores the huge changes that take place in the life of one woman, Soozie, who after suffering from profound hearing loss for over 20 years, has had a good level of hearing restored through undergoing cochlear implant (CI) surgery.
Sound
MA
2011
Rounds
Rounds is a film that explores notions of masculinity and the social functions of place from three different generational perspectives in a boxing gym in Newport, South Wales. The film evokes experience in the gym, concentrating on the intense structures and rhythms of a training session that over time shape the pugilist’s sense of self.
Video
MA
2016
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
Niishii – Night Worlds
Set in Dubrajpur (West Bengal, India) during the summer monsoons of June and July, Niishii is an ethnographic film that attempts to capture the essence of the semi-urban night in a small town from its pre-electrification years as a village before 1958 to its radically altered present state.
Video
MA
2017
Air Pressure
A collaborative project exploring the heard world of one farming family whose organic holding is now encircled by an international airport in Narita, Japan. The project went on to become a CD-book, a touring film and a gallery installation.
Sound, Video
Staff
2011
Living the Weather
An experimental and collaborative documentary on people’s everyday experiences of the weather and seasons in the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire. Part of a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust and led by Professor Jennifer Mason at the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, Department of Sociology, University of Manchester
Video
Staff
2016
Take Me To A Place Outside
A phenomenological enquiry into the experience of imprisonment. Drawing on anthropologically informed theories of perception and imagination this film explores the relationship between the real and the unreal, the physical and the imagined, and the in- and the outside as rendered through the experience of everyday life in prison.
Photography, Sound, Video
MA
2009
Caught in Between Darkness and Light
This photographic audio-documentary tells the story of the brief journey that a small group of refugees took from Milan to Calais. One of the objectives of this project was to give an alternative representation of refugee experiences to those produced by national and international official media, most of which reflect and enhance the growing xenophobic tendency that accentuates a sense of otherness and alienation by cultivating popular feelings of fear or pity.
Photography, Sound
MA
2008
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