Space: A screening of Artists’ short films (Fringe Arts Bath Festival)

About

Space has always been an integral element in artists’ practice, regardless of genre, epoch or medium. It has been drawn, sculpted, designed, reimagined, explored, or simply experienced in a myriad of ways, bringing the audiences’ attention to the spaces they inhabit, and asking that they look at them differently. Of course, the artistic exploration of space is not confined to the physical environment. Artists of all genres, and not least those working in film and video, have presented space through an intellectual, emotional and/or sociopolitical lens, recognising that space is not merely a site that our bodies inhabit.

The Covid pandemic has seen us cede control over the space around us in ways most of us have not experienced before. We have been spatially confined and yet, paradoxically, the lines between our public and private spheres have become increasingly blurred. More recently, the artificial boundaries we put in place have begun to dissolve yet the world that we inhabit has forever changed and we have changed along with it. For Space – a screening of artists’ short films, we invited artists to explore notions of space as we emerge from a world in which the space around us has rarely been so measured and so protected, and seemed so confined - or so vast.

All of the works selected for this screening have been made since the pandemic began, and some of them are a direct response to the lockdown. In very different ways, Sudhir Ambasana and Francesca Giuliano examine domestic interiors and the possessions that help to shape their perception and experience of those spaces. Sara Townley revisits her ancestral home and reflects upon the complexities of the intergenerational transmission of trauma it represents. Meanwhile, Camille Serisier questions the very concept of ‘home’ and what it means when the term has no designated site.

Becky Moriarty and Tom Wright escape their four walls and take us with them through their local environs, each respectively questioning or asserting their sense of belonging within them. Celina Collot explores Marc Auge’s concept of ‘non-place’, that liminal space we exist in when in transit, for example – spaces in which concerns about relations, history and identity cease to exist. In contrast, Flora Litchfield invites us into a site imbued with its own history, having borne witness to generations of people at work and at play.

Through explorations of personal and communal histories, spaces, and objects, these films interrogate the interdependence of place, perception and memory, to thoughtfully reflect upon our relationships to domestic and public spaces, and the ways in which they influence our sense of self, home, community and belonging.