When Dahlias Bend Down

When Dahlias Bend Down is a short documentary that resonates with observational filming practices. It is a portrait of the difficult everyday life an elderly couple in a village in Greece faces, realising that the end of their life journey together approaches. As the film’s protagonists are the filmmaker’s grandparents, the documentary attains additional meaning, that of an artefact of his personal archive, and future trigger for nostalgia.

In Search of A Past

This submission provides a context for the artwork and moving image piece, In Search of A Past. It outlines my approaches, my research concerns, the contribution to the field, and the significance of practice as research. Moreover, I examine the influences of artist Bill Viola, photographer Thomas Ruff, slow cinema filmmakers and the importance of the family archive.

Anatomy of a Mermaid: Subverting the performative image of the pregnant woman

In the play Anatomía dunha serea Galician actress Iria Pinheiro uses parody to share the experiences of obstetric violence she went through during and after childbirth. Humour has been commonly used in films to portray pregnant women. However, this has helped to perpetuate a performative image of this experience rather than subverting the imaginary. I filmed Pinheiro’s play and creative process to look at how Pinheiro uses parody to subvert the portrayals of the pregnant woman and, with this paper and video essay I aim to open up a conversation about how to portray this uncomfortable topic on screen.

Thinking Through Form

3xShapes of Home (2020) is a 7 minute experimental video, exploring how essayist film practice may be a way to think topographically, that is: to think conceptually through non-verbal techniques such as camera movement, camera position, montage and algorithm, about place forms and place structures, and their projective powers for the imagination of place. The video is part of a larger study on the Essay Film as Topography. 3xShapes of Home won the Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment 2020.

The Park

In December 2016 over 150 permanent residents at the Wantirna Caravan Park were handed eviction notices and given a year to vacate. The Park (2019) explores the final eight months before the closure. This film de-centres narrative to provide a series of vignettes of life in the park as the residents collect petitions, write letters and hold roadside protests.

Repented and Flora and Dambudzo

A practice-research journey across two experimental films, Flora and Dambudzo (2015) and Repented (2019), which share a core compelling question about the influence of colonialism on intimate relationships in Zimbabwe. Flora and Damudzo (2015) depicts a scene between the iconic Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera and his German lover Flora Veit Wild using words from their historical writing. Repented (2019) is based on a play by Zimbabwean playwright Stanely Makuwe and focuses on the confrontational meeting of two characters after a long absence. Through split screen editing, the film also incorporates archive material shot during the colonial times in Rhodesia and South Africa which serves as an expressive illustration of the profound injustice, oppressiveness and gestures of defiance that occurred. Through this sustained enquiry, Piotrowska describes the process of adapting different material for the screen, explores notions of theatricality and reflects on the significant period of time between the creation of the films as a period of learning and questioning her own preconceptions and ideas.

Chek Lap Kok (Hong Kong Airport) 21.00 01.12.19

Chek Lap Kok (Hong Kong Airport) 21.00 01.12.19 is a short video by Stephen Connolly which documents a walk to Hong Kong Airport from the Expo centre on the airport island, by means of slow travel, under makeshift conditions, and without carbon expenditure. The video offers a brief exploration of the materialities and grounded infrastructures of aviation at a moment of pandemic-led change and invites us to look anew at the familiar and banal physical geography of the airport and how we move within it, drawing on Lefebvre’s Production of Space and theories of ‘Spatial Cinema’.

Chek Lap Kok (Hong Kong Airport) 21.00 01.12.19

Chek Lap Kok (Hong Kong Airport) 21.00 01.12.19 is a short video by Stephen Connolly which documents a walk to Hong Kong Airport from the Expo centre on the airport island, by means of slow travel, under makeshift conditions, and without carbon expenditure. The video offers a brief exploration of the materialities and grounded infrastructures of aviation at a moment of pandemic-led change and invites us to look anew at the familiar and banal physical geography of the airport and how we move within it, drawing on Lefebvre’s Production of Space and theories of ‘Spatial Cinema’.