Dust as Metadata and Hand-painting Animation Frames: Researching and Developing Upon Artistic Resources for Digital Publication and Moving Image Production

Application summary

In recent years, I have been working with themes related to the performance of work, non-work and loitering as a form of resistance. By investigating traditional ideas of work within contemporary times, the practice observes how we respond to the pluralities of a future society. It seeks to host possibilities of drafting and implementing policies and methodologies that may subvert dominant ways of looking at work, especially now when returning to normal is steadily challenged by ideas of what that ‘normalcy’ could represent. Over the period of home residency, I continue to build upon two projects that can be conducted through research and independent practice : (1) Dust as Metadata: collecting and scanning domestic dust. Dust is a kind of interface– scientific, but also mundane and everyday. Within the domestic, it becomes a proto-archive, a record of what happened. For several months now, I have meticulously been collecting dust from my carpet and will begin documenting it in order to be able to look at them more closely so as to observe how they may reveal details about us and how we view labour, matter and identities entangled within domestic spaces. (2) The earth turned red the day I lay on it: hand-painting frames. Technique tests for a larger body of an experimental/animation video piece to follow later this year. The project involves hand-painting each frame to be incorporated within a larger work to be shot on 16mm. During the home residency, I will be developing these tests that require several hours to produce and reproduce motion. The tests are to understand the possibility of including this technique when producing a film based on artist and collaborator Naya Magaliou’s text which reckons an individual’s position as a foreign body – culturally as well as economically and how one navigates these precarious positions. It investigates bodily autonomy from familial, feminist as well as postcolonial perspectives.