Forget me not
L’au-delà FULL FILM
Official Posters for the film
Colour Version
Black and White Version
I based these designs on a self portrait (referencing the scene featuring the poem that names the project) mimicking the style of the painterly 1950s cinematic advertisings, delving solely on the genre of horror and suspense. The overall graphic product of these posters was created in collaboration with Paúl Adrián.
Dramatic Recital of The Screenplay
This video was produced in order to offer a corporeal presence to the spoken word, offering a brief entry portraying the moon in the protagonist’s dream. An experiment to enhance the performative element of the narration.
Synopsis
My most recent project has been inspired and informed by the Spiritualist movement of the Victorian era, considering its philosophy as an adjacent cult to Christianity. In the storyline I introduce the passions and motives of the spiritualists in the format of an epistolary anthology of sorts. The narrator writes letters to her childhood friend Julia (a fervent Christian traditionalist.). The timeline envelops the week previous to the séance. In terms of the imagery and moving image I have introduced brief snippets of video footage as well as analogue photography and animated sequences of painted photographs. I consider the voice at this point: a sculptural material, and find experimenting with its effect and potential a growing fascination. Of course the images will feature esoteric objects as well as, for the first time, images of myself as an embodiment of the main character . The screening will be accompanied by two death masks and a small porcelain sculpture named The Medium.
The theoretical concerns in this final film would be: the execution of mourning and recollection, the allure of the unknown, and the ritualistic approach to contacting other dimensions; as well as the immortality of the soul and the problematic of the limbo. The Spiritualist movement at its origins was deeply involved with the suffragette movement and the socialist cause. The narrator voices these issues, engaging in a feminist discourse which fights back the hidden responses from her friend, often acquiring a tone of rebellion towards the distant era she lives within. Julia symbolises the most stern facet of the church, and the protagonist offers an opposed position which roots for progress and romanticises her own obsession with The Beyond.
The storyline reveals brief clues as to the personal trajectory of the main character, implying her engagement with bohemian life, mourning of her own child and the renounce to a patriarchal God. She cherishes her independence and embarks into a cult which will provide bizarre forms of contact with the spiritual world. As to the nature of the writing, it is, rather than a story in the classical sense, a preamble. Something which precedes the main event and ends precisely at the beginning of the most important scene, which remains occult to the audience. The timeline is carefully blurred, as is mentioned in one of the scenes “I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me these events have already happened.” and “I live in an ever expanding haze.” The play with temporality offers an alternative to the story telling structure which has settled within our collective unconscious.
Photographic Archive
L’au-delà The Installation
This installation accompanies the film in order to treat one of the subjects that were also part of the key content within The Fragmented Icon series (The Vaults and Death And The Maiden): the agency of the artwork. The materiality of these sculptures presents in the first sculpture a third dimensional proposal to the character of the medium who protagonizes the final scene and in the second and third two of the participants in the seance. This side of the project focuses on the animism that applies to physical objects, referred to in the work of artists such as Susan Hiller, Dorothea Tanning, Barbara Hepworth or Louise Bourgeois. This concept connects intimately with spiritual beliefs that are often infantilized which have found recognition in the field of art, through the voice of many sculptors from different eras. Mirroring the film and illustrating some of its characters the installation establishes a tension between different mediums and opens up a dialogue between the silver screen and its voluminous counterpart. These faces have been modelled after three generations of my own family, featuring the visage of my grandmother my mother and my own.
The Medium (Small format porcelain sculpture)
The Dream (Life size death masks)
