Unfound 2016 – 18

UNFOUND is a film commissioned by Diaphane to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, 1916.

The film addresses the landscape of the Somme in the present through a series of image and sound episodes which avoid an overall narrative, instead focusing upon everyday details of seasonal change, light and industrial presences which encroach upon the Somme cemeteries. The film acknowledges that what is seen is overdetermined by the history of the site as a ‘theatre of war’, and that landscape photography in this context, as with institutionalised memorials, tends to conceal as much as it reveals. Therefore, the film intersperses durational landscape recordings with fragments of personal text inscriptions taken from individual cemetery headstones. These fragile texts require constant re-engraving against the erosion of time, and the work suggests that it is through erasure and the act of re-inscription that the past is transformed in the present.

The work is accompanied by catalogue ‘UNFOUND’ with DVD and essays by Susan Trangmar and Yves Abrioux. A separate essay ‘Passages of Inscription’ expands the context of the war, connecting northern France with Sussex through a Sussex family history and the artist’s experience of making UNFOUND.

‘In the lonely fields and the Commonwealth War Graves engraving factory at Arras, the cycle of inscription and re-inscription goes on. Patiently carved and re-carved by human hand and programmed cutter, an existence is hollowed out of the stone as the drill tenderly cuts a curving line here, a full stop there. There is always space for EIN UNBEKANNTER. The pressure of the touch must be just so to achieve the shape of the movement and so it is in the cut that the force of signification is felt. LOVED. The invisible is made visible before fading, and re-inscribed can never return the same twice. The impression of the trace is ungraspable, torn from origin, yet persistent. Time is spelt out and experienced as a staying with. Not an endurance of stone, but an endurance of attention in and for the now. This is what makes a difference. In the cut is the call of a VOICE, even though UNFOUND.‘ Susan Trangmar, extract from catalogue

Moving image (extract). The full length film can be viewed here.

Links

‘Ou Loge La Memoire?’ Le Quadratilere, Beauvais, France. 15 September – 31 December 2018 exhibition installation

Autumnales Festival, Le Quadratilere, Beauvais, France. (anniversary of Battle of the Somme ). Film screening 14 September 2016. www.diaphane.org

Fabrica Brighton Film Festival, film screening 16 November 2018.

‘Passages of Inscription’, essay photographies, Vol. 12 issue 1, 63 – 80. ISSN: 1754-0763 (Print) 1754-0771 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpho20

UNFOUND catalogue and DVD available from the artist or www.diaphane-editions.com ISBN 978-2919077-39-7