ENCOUNTERS:

 

Production year: 2007

 

Format: Video / Lecture with PowerPoint presentation.

 

Participants: Rebecca Ramsden, Hugh Hemmings, Belinda Blanchard, Debbie Lampon + anonymous people.

 

 

Where does the video end and the experience begin?

 

Encounters exists as a performative lecture, including a PowerPoint presentation of moving and still images collated in a ‘film of fragments’. It narrates my journey through London parks in search for what I long for the most.

 

The lecture shows my process of contacting people in the park and asking if I can film them up close, almost touching them with my camera. This pursuit of intimacy, pushing through the representational border of the camera frame, leads to a succession of real and fictional stories of interaction.

 

The work looks at the inherent paradox of the gaze and how it requires an inner reversal so as to see the outer surroundings. I have tried to look at the possibility of collapsing the visual distance – in-between the subjects in the film, the filmmaker and the subject, and the film and the viewer – to take a closer look at what it might mean to discover a representation of the Other within the impossibility of doing so.