Q&A
Melanie Jame Wolf

What’s your background?
I’ve arrived at making moving image work from a background in theater and choreography. As such, I’m really interested in approaching filmmaking as an expanded choreographic practice.
What influences you artistically?
When I encounter a work of art so intricately layered in its intelligence and wit and devotion to formal inquiry that I felt like the edges of my body are dissolving in some kind of haptic communion with the sculpture, the text, the edit, the song.
I find the idea of art making being a lifetime of learning in public to be a persuasive one.
I think about Lucretia Martel’s La Cienaga all the time, and Chantal Ackerman, and Lizzie Borden. Distinctive voices with clear, persistent formal signatures.
How do you start a new work?
I generally start with an image, a vision. Then as I work to materialise the vision – often failing – I parse out the references, the thinking around it, try again and try to deepen the ways in which the work will be an invitation.
What are you working on right now?
A collaboration with choreographer Martin Hansen called The Superimposition that will look at dance scenes as ruptures in narrative features. And a video and textile installation series called The Creep, which will be about Walter Benjamin’s idea of Mythic Violence, and the device of the unreliable narrator.