Léna Lewis-King

I came into filmmaking from a practice of drawing and painting, beginning with making short rotoscoped animations. My family are painters, sculptors and sound artists, so I was looking for a medium that could combine disparate artistic practices into one. Using film as a discursive medium is key to my practice and world-view. The content of my work has always been focused on women and forms of representation, and so as my work has developed, so has the depth and variety of my research.

I try to remain open to observing everything around me, so my influences are very broad and intuition based. I’m very influenced by methods of philosophical or physical deconstruction, focusing on specific topics like magic, sexuality, technology and Patriarchal structures. I’m currently reading Carla Lonzi’s book ‘Autoritratto’, and her polyphonic approach is influencing my interest in collaborative practices and complex questions surrounding identity and formation of creative cultures, and so of course reading influences my work substantially.

In order to give my work structure, I write poetic texts that outline how the visual narrative will evolve throughout the duration of the film, alongside exploring evocative visual ideas and potential dynamics, principals or symbols (like water, the sun, the factory conveyor belt, etc) which allows me to form juxtapositions and tension to be explored within the film works. Additionally, I collect visual research over a long period of time, and usually create hand-drawn copies and illustrations of images that inform the content of the film.

Currently I’m working on three projects. The first project is Apertura Institute, an organisation that focuses on forming moving image cultures in Lisbon through conducting interviews, pooling resources and research, and the institute will eventually be housed in a physical location in Portugal to host exhibitions, residency and events.

I’m also working on two personal film projects. One is an impressionistic landscape video exploring Barreiro, Portugal, as a complex architectural and historical location, and the other project is a multi-channel film exploring methods of olive oil processing from picking to the factory.

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Jessie Growden

I grew up between a garden centre in the North of England and a commercial forest in the South of Scotland, while generally not having much fun at school until I got in with the drama crowd. I completed a BA (Hons) in design for textiles in the Scottish Borders in 2014, the same year I was introduced to moving image and artists’ film. While I enjoyed designing, I found myself too cynical about the culture of low quality, exploitative fashion and unwilling to move to London to pursue a career in it. I worked for Alchemy Film & Arts between 2016 – 2019 while developing my own video based practice, which is informed greatly by my compulsion to write a journal and catalogue the world, and experiences of the locations and situations I find myself in.

The urge to document and catalogue, to study and understand these places, cultures and landscapes we’re in. Recently I’ve been investigating the town of Hawick in the Scottish Borders. Women are still discouraged from taking part in some traditional aspects of the culture here, and I want to question that in my work from my position of being an insider and an outsider.

It really varies – sometimes I start with an idea, and plan what I’m going to film, then go out to systematically gather the footage. Other times I work with things I already have, or make more spontaneously. I almost always print screenshots of all the sequences I have intended for the project, and do a first edit through those before I take a video into any kind of production. There’s always a lot of note-taking and scribbling of thoughts throughout.

Right now, I’m working on a project about the trees in a woodland I’ve spent a lot of time in throughout my life. Many of the trees were damaged during storm Arwen and other weather this winter, and I’ve been investigating the angles they’ve fallen to, and am experimenting with using film to put them back the right way up.

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Stefano Miraglia

Film studies, and media history. Furthermore, I have a background in music-making and still photography, which I started practicing during my adolescence.

Obviously the people I work and live with are my main influence. Then, part of my curatorial work influences my artistic practice and vice versa. Besides that: music, photography and painting. These worlds influenced my conception of cinema and the way I approached my moving image work: a still photograph, a painting, or a music piece, can count as cinema, and their specific practices can inform the way a film can be assembled.

Most of the time I don’t film for a specific project: I tend to record the images and store them, without even watching them. It’s an archive. Time passes and the memory of some moments I recorded emerges. I look for those images, watch them, and try to understand them. Then there’s the attempt to assemble them with other images and sounds I made, in different contexts. I work on them as if it was a found footage project – making new associations, highlighting some aspects, giving them new meanings. Of course this doesn’t apply to every single project: I also do fieldwork for some specific projects.

I am doing research for a film that I would like to shoot in the outskirts of Málaga, the city where I was born. It’s about gentrification and family history.

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Krzysztof Honowski

I was born in the North West of London and grew up in the polish diaspora there. I then studied English Literature, through which I came to be interested in experimental theatre and literature. Almost as soon as I began to make my own bits of theatre or poetry I realised that the only context available for it in the 21st century was in the art world, so after a few years of collaborating with friends in Berlin I went to study at the Slade. By that point, however, I’d put down some roots in Germany and was soon back here working in theatre and opera and studying at the KHM in Cologne. A particular interest of mine is the intersection of psychedelia and postmemory, which is what I am researching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna at present.

I try to read and look at things as widely as possible – whether watching movies, seeing exhibitions, or just out of my window – and wait for something to stick with me. Even when it’s not possible to take things in, let’s say I’m too busy or stressed out (as was the case in the last two years) then I am always listening. Music and the social interactions around it, whether what happens when you go to a club or the rich history of graphic design associated with musical production and its ephemera, are a constant source of energy and inspiration for me.

I collaborate extensively with other artists, so I am often on the lookout for a point of interaction or exchange, where I can privilege the voice of others as much as my own. My upcoming documentary works have begun as conversations with friends that have turned into interviews and then films and collages. I try to maintain an archive of images that I have either taken or found and begin by arranging them so as to work out what’s missing. I try to acknowledge unconscious impulses by collaging material impulsively, either as objects in the studio or layers of video material. I then start to cut into these agglomerations, filing them down in a lapidary process, like you would form a precious stone.

Me and Ziemowit Nowak have just completed a film about polish glam rock and its impossibility which we are sending to festivals. Next year I will begin a documentary project about the late French musician Ghédalia Tazartès and present a new performance installation at the Kunstverein Leverkusen together with Laura Sundermann.

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Daniel Theiler

I have a background in architecture, which certainly explains my interest in the aesthetics and proportions of our built environment and its influences on the people inhabitating it. However, I am also particularly fascinated by the utopian and auratic potentials of architecture to embody and manifest new social ideas. We are strongly influenced by our surroundings, relationships and living conditions. I therefore try to fundamentally question orders and systems and find their potentials. The examination of spaces and atmospheres, site specificity and their embeddedness in historical and cultural contexts are important anchor points of my work. I try to break down systems to make their parts and features more accessible and to expose their absurdities.

I like the big things in small things, so I am influenced by the events and things that surround me every day. I like to dive deep into stories to break them down, turn them around and put them back together again. Especially a city like Berlin, with its diverse history, tells us a lot of stories and myths, which I use as inspiration for my work. I have long and intensively studied the development of Berlin Mitte, its architectural transformation and the creation of a historical copy of the lost original. I was particularly interested in the history of the Berlin Palace, which has now reopened as an uncritical reconstruction of the demolished palace in the form of the “Humboldtforum”. After a whole series of works on Berlin’s Mitte, which drive the absurdity of this Disneyland of reconstruction and history to even further extremes and the publication of the book “Reconstructing Tomorrow”, which was published this year by Hatje Cantz, I currently turn to new topics.

Usually after I find a topic that fascinates me, I start writing a concept and make some drawings. My work is usually preceded by intensive research. To do this, I study the history of the place, go to archives and conduct interviews. For example, for my work Top Down Memory, I visited the ZDF television archive in Mainz, the federal archive in Berlin, and I conducted interviews with historians and relatives of contemporary witnesses. After I identify what exactly interests me about the topic, I think about which story I want to tell and in which way. I subsequently develop an idea about which material or which medium is most suitable for the work. I often use a combination of different materials. In my working process I always try to take different perspectives, to change the scale, to zoom in and out again and to take apart and put the parts back together. The process is very analytical. I think this comes from my training as an architect to always look for the ideal solution. For me, however, it is clear that I cannot provide the ideal solution and certainly no answers – I rather try to raise more questions. I try to provide viewers with points of reference to the themes, which are often humorous, sometimes ironic but always very inviting.

Right now I am working on two video projects, one is about the relationships between migration and mobility and the other one deals with the challenges of a reunited Germany more than thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the same time, I am turning more to drawing and painting, for which I have a great passion. I want to create a new perspective on architecture and the artificial built environment, of course with a touch of humor.

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Jason Moyes

My awareness of experimental film came to me in my 30’s in the form of the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. From attending this annual event as an audience member, I went on to volunteer for a number of years before attending each year as an exhibitor. With no formal training in experimental film or an arts degree of any kind, watching work, meeting artists and attending Q&A sessions was my education.

I’m influenced by the landscape here in South East Scotland, and have made work in the forests surrounding my home. I produce an experimental film podcast and I draw inspiration from talking to artists I admire about their creative and technical processes. I am part of a film collective and the individual members and the collective as a whole have significantly influenced my work over the years.

More often than not my early research involves spending time in a physical space that interests me and meditating on the concepts, themes, feeling or messages I hope to share through the moving image. I think I instinctively know when it’s time to pick up the camera, and from there fully immerse myself in utter joy or mental anguish of shooting and editing and shooting and editing until I think the work is completed.

Our film collective is running a short residential where 10 of us will each install a moving image and multi-media work that collectively respond to a central concept of interspecies communication, and to the challenge of making work for a forest. I am focusing on this work at the moment and looking forward to seeing what can be achieved.

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Jamila Prowse

I have a background in Art History, which has given me a research-based underpinning to my practice. Initially, I began working as a curator and writer, focused on devising new languages around blackness and identity, and supporting underrepresented artists. At the end of 2020, I shifted my focus to sit across writing and art making, in part as a response to the worsening in an impairment I have had for most of my life. I use my experiences as a disabled, mixed race person of Black parentage to propel a personal interrogation through my work.

Primarily, I’m influenced by auteothnographic practices, and the potentials for the personal to provide cultural and contextual specificity to political and social structures. I was drawn to moving image as a medium, through a deep appreciation of moving image as a form of self-archiving, in the work of artists such as Rochelle White, Rabz Lansiquot, Evan Ifekoya, Larry Achiampong and Rehana Zaman. My hope is that by referencing my own experiences and background in my work, I can move away from what Saidiya Hartman terms ‘the violence of abstraction’; something I think is particularly important when considering race and disability.

I tend to have things floating around in my head, sparked by something I’ve seen or heard, or passing thoughts. I’ll often be noting these down in notebooks, as starting points or references for new works. The way my brain works means that once I’ve thought of something, if it holds any meaning or curiosity for me I won’t be able to get out of my head. Often, I will have been thinking of a work for months to years preceding doing anything with it. Then, when I have enough space and capacity to face it, I’ll start attempting to draw what’s in my head out into the physical world. I often find that as I’m in the process of making a work, I’ll have conversations with friends and peers which will provide new ways of seeing and understanding a work. When I was making An Echo For My Father, a conversation with my friend Joseph Bond helped me to consider that a visualisation of absence was interrelated with gaps and silences in both the image and audio. When I reached the stage of postproduction another friend, Jemma Desai, convinced me to take out the voiceover which was originally in the work and replace it with closed captions – lending itself more to an evocation of this silence. While I’m quite a solitary person, I often find conversations which occur in parallel to something I’m working on bring out new perspectives and threads. This process is also helpful in considering how works are never made in a vacuum, they are always influenced by the environments and contexts in which they are made. As a disabled person, I tend to work very gradually, taking regular breaks and building rest time in. Wherever possible, I try to bring slowness into my practice, as a reminder of Tina Campt’s theorising that slowness isn’t just a change in velocity, it also shifts what we give our attention to.

I’ve just moved into my first permanent artist studio space at Studio Voltaire, which will hopefully give me more time and physical space to make work. Until the end of the summer, I’m concluding my MA in Art History and writing my dissertation, which continues research I’ve been doing into institutional harm. Simultaneously, I’m undertaking writing projects, continuing to centre my research around disability, and beginning to think about fundraising to make the two follow up films to An Echo For My Father. The intention with the film series is for each subsequent film to expand out further, moving from the micro experience of absence to the macro cultural connections between Cape Town and London. As part of that work, I hope to take a research trip to South Africa, which would be my first time visiting the country, in order to document and archive the process of uncovering my paternal lineage.

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Sidsel Christensen

My educational background is within fine art and filmmaking. I did the larger bulk of my education in London, at Goldsmith College and Royal College of art. I studied film at a foundational level in Denmark and this was a great base for how my work has developed.

I get a lot of inspiration from devouring science fiction. Writers like Ursula Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Octavia Butler, and can I say Donna Haraway in this context, hehe? There are male sci-fi writers too of course, but here I would like to highlight Liu Cixin and his book series «The Three-Body Problem”. I love how he takes it to mind-bending intergalactic extremes; especially how he explores human movement into the 4th dimension and the 2nd dimension.

Currently I am also very much inspired by the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, especially her intersubjective practices and soft body sculptures. A mix between her and the Buddha. He was quite ground-breaking too in his approach to the body – mind link.

It varies. The projects seem to ferment for a while, often through a very wide range of interests and guilty pleasures that I look at, people I engage with, books and films. Then, suddenly it clicks together in an unexpected way. That is when I get the drive to realize the work. With the “performance installations” I do, the work is not really happening before it engages the audience. So then starting would mean making the installation and other supporting “infrastructure” for this interaction.

Right now, I am working on understanding what artistic research really means and how it fits into my practice. As I am now an official PhD candidate at the Art Academy in Bergen Norway, I guess I ought to find out, hehe. Currently, I am looking into how it is possible to move into the 4th dimension, live action roleplay techniques and building structures with people and strings. The latter is a bit hard at the moment due to Covid-19, since I can’t really invite people to join me. The structures keep collapsing, and when I build them it seems more like I am engaged with some kind of absurd Becket-like performance. I am also planning a performative lecture about LOVE. Not romantic love, but love on a communal level. I think that is what’s most needed right now.

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