VIDEO PIECES

I engage with video as a medium and a tool in a number of ways. Sometimes, there are works or projects that employ video elements as an integral part [i.e. ALL WITHIN A COLLAPSING BUILDING, a necrology or we decompose, we bristle with life]. Other times I create short videos as part of the creative process, as a means of working out compositional or aesthetic matters, or perhaps riffing on a particular project's themes and exploring tangents [i.e. WINDWARD & LEEWARD (a refugee requiem)]. Then, there are occasions when I reconceive live performances as video pieces, remaking the work in a way that goes beyond simply documentation [i.e. Pugnus Vulgaris]. Also, on occasion, I create video works that more or less stand alone as singular creations and experiments.

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I created this video, which borrows the format of scrolling ticker tape text used by Jenny Holzer in her truisms, within the context of i am small THE WORLD IS BIG (2011), a community-orientated project I ran as a member of Accidental Collective.

Memento Mori (January 2013)

The Latin warning “memento mori”, translates as “remember death”, or “remember you must die”. Though stand-alone and created independently, these pieces were conceived in the context of Accidental Collective's here is where we meet (2013). This stage production, inspired by John Berger's homonymous semi-autobiographical novel, weaved together his vivid stories with our own, in an attempt to sort through memories and fictions as if they were objects found in a dusty attic. A creative tangent of sorts, Memento Mori further explored this preoccupation with mortality by employing a baroque aesthetic, visually as well as aurally (the music is by Jean-Baptiste Lully, composer at the court of Louis XIV). Like the theatre production which led to it, this video piece sought to open up a meditative space to contemplate the passing of things.

P33 (March 2016)

P33 started as an image, and my perverse desire to buy myself a crown of thorns for my 33rd birthday (17/03/16). This video piece primarily serves as a solipsistic marker for this significant date (Jesus was 33 when he was supposedly crucified). It employs religious iconography and a Spanish Easter march (El Cachorro, The Puppy) in a resolutely carnivalesque fashion which is both apotheosic and derisive. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. P33 is a collaboration with Jason Brooks, who edited the footage he shot at Reculver (Kent).

Masculine Expressions of My Creative Prowess (July 2017)

This series of videos was created within the context of the polymorphously-perverse performance project of the same title. They are a parallel collaboration with award-winning videographers Guillermo Alcala-Santaella, (teasers 1, 2, 3) and Jason Brooks (teaser 4). The videos were published ahead of the the project 'outing' at Camden People's Theatre as part of 'Come As You Are' in September 2017. They were accompanied with the tagline:Tirelessly hacking away at 'masculinity' and digging for gold... What lies under the surface?

LA DEMOCRACIA NO ES UNA LOTERÍA, ES ALGO QUE NOS HACEMOS A NOSOTROS MISMOS /DEMOCRACY IS NOT A LOTTERY, IT'S SOMETHING WE DO TO OURSELVES (22nd December 2017)

On the 21st December 2017, Catalonia was forced by the central government in Madrid, to have elections for its regional parliament. The 22nd December 2017 was the day of the famous lottery draw of El Gordo. This prompted a rough and ready video experiment. A little reflexion about the Catalan question. The text's intonation echoes the way the children of San Ildefonso ‘sing’ the numbers and prices.
Watch the original broadcast of the lottery draw here. An English translation of my text is available under the YouTube comments on the video.

BEETLE BALLETS - no.1 to no.11
(March - April 2020)

This is a collection of short video pieces I created whilst under Covid-19 lock-down. Somehow the metaphor of a beetle that can't get back up spoke to me about the wider context and my personal experience. In the beetles' mostly failed attempts to turn themselves over and escape from their boxes and off screen, something begins to emerge.... Something beautiful and vulnerable. Something calm and frantic. Something haphazard and graceful. Something filled with futility and resolve.

WINDWARD and LEEWARD (a refugee requiem) - videos
(July 2020)

CASTA DIVA - memento mori
(September 2020)

This video was created in response to Marina Abramovic's opera 7 Deaths of Maria Callas. Made with dead insects I have been finding and collecting throughout the summer.

Click on the CC icon to read the English subtitles.

Solastalgia trilogy
(July - September 2022)

On Tuesday 22 August 2023, at the 'tender' age of 40, I received surgical stitches for the first time ever (after a silly accident whilst washing up a glass, which broke and gave me a semi-circular cut on the first knuckle of my right hand).

Documenting the procedure became a kind of safe distancing mechanism, allowing me to achieve a certain degree of detachment from the experience whilst enabling me to view the footage in detail at a later pint. Documenting the procedure also gave me the opportunity to use it as material for this video piece.

The footage has been edited so that it is not (excessively) gory. Since it remains in the background, with the text in the foreground, the eye can move (or can be pulled) from one to the other - creating a dialogic tension between the foreground and the background.

Whilst the footage is (in a sense) autobiographical, the piece itself is not. I am precisely interested in the use of such material to create works which, going beyond a staging/articulation/exploration of the autobiographical self, address wider questions.

The initial draft edit featured as musical background a more direct loop of the original 2015 remastered recording of The Beatle's 'I want to hold your hand". In a perfect example of how 'limitations can lead to greater creativity', YouTube did not allow me to post this first edit due to copyright infringement. To overcome this limitation and make the video public, I needed a more nuanced and 'original' sound edit (cheating the copyright algorithm).

For this second version, I shortened the use of the original recording and replaced it with the isolated vocals and the isolated drums and clapping. It was during this process of revising the sound edit that I also reworked the video edit. I added the second sentence; which I hope amplifies both the work's playful pun-based humour and its socially engaged subtext.

I hope the piece offers a multiplicity of conceptual layers that resonate with questions around public healthcare, our need for each other (as helping/healing hands), and the provocation to ponder how each of us might help/heal others.

Performers: Nurse Clara - as healing hands; Pablo Pakula - as wounded hand.

Music: The Beatles - 'I want to hold your hand' (remixed).

Venue: Centro de Salud Integrado el Campello (Alicante, Spain).