Because all of my films are in a way these small, kind of like, celluloid cut-offs of
what much longer lives are, what much longer histories are, you know it's like
five different lives in this film, so I wanted to replicate a mass
like a mass of time. I wanted to like put it all out, it's kind of like a
history machine, you know.
I try to be very light on my feet. I work from my
kitchen table, I guess because I migrated from New Zealand when I was quite young
I've been packing up and moving, I don't know, for the last six years,
either for visa reasons or because I move around, or have to move around I got used
to, kind of like, making work on the run. I get to London and two things have happened.
My grandmother has become ill with this condition that's hereditary and there
is this moment of this broadcast, these videos of police violence against black
lives, and so I kind of came across this book, Callie Angell's
documentation of Andy Warhol's screentests, and rather than look at Warhol's archive
and the lack of people of colour, rather than look at that as simply for objective
critique, I started to think like, what if it's intentional, because it's
unfurnished? And so I used this book to just buy the same film stock and the
same camera and to practice of set-ups that would be exactly as if Andy Warhol
was remaking the screentests, and to remake a screen test with a person who, in a way
was playing another person. Brandon, who's the grandson of Dorothy 'Cherry' Groce, who
was shot in Brixton in '85, he stares at the camera. It ends and then the camera comes
back on and it's an image of Graeme, who's the son of Joy Gardner, who was
killed in Crouch End in '93, in a dawn raid for her deportation, and he stares
the camera down. I think a lot of the really detailed ways of working, it's just by
having those relationships with people and I'm almost against the idea they were
framing or collecting anything from that. So the only thing I'm really left with when
I work is kind of drawings and notes and newspaper kind of articles and then I
don't keep any of it, and I don't really have any space to keep any of it.
'I think of you, Miss Reynolds, as my hero, and as such as my hope to tell your story not
through an interview or documentary, but instead through a cinematic film portrait.
'10 minutes long and would capture you silently seated as you might sit on any
other occasion. In my eyes, this film would bring into focus your story emphasised
after the event of July 6, recognising you as a person and for grounding the
audience with your survival after the tragedy that occurred in your life.'
In the second title, Autoportrait, you're looking at film footage of Diamond Reynolds
who is a celebrity for the worst day of her life. She was stopped with her
partner and her child by the police and in 74 seconds an officer fired seven
bullets into their car, killing her partner Philando Castile, and she live-streamed to that.
She got onto Facebook Live and she went live with exactly what was unfolding and
I think what's so extraordinary about that document that she produced is that
she very carefully narrates back to the police person, and us, and the world
exactly what was occurring.
I started to think like, what would it mean to make a second broadcast? Could my work
have a different kind of presence that reminds the audience that this person is real.
_Human, it's the last title in the trilogy, and I wanted to go back to
where a kind of beginning was for me, so _Human is a kind of like
filmed portrait of an artwork that is also a part of a body. It's a work made
by the British artist Donald Rodney, of a small architectural model of a house
made out of skin that he collected from his leg after surgery. The two core
tenets of that work, one is to figure out an appropriate
translation, kind of the right appropriation for it. I wanted it to be a
really careful study. I wanted to see it like a cathedral and I wanted to see all
of the little references that I think Donald left for us within this object but
it was always this kind of like, other part which is that, you know, the illness
that I was referring to in the beginning of this trilogy, I wanted to be more
overt to it, you know. And so, because in my own body I carry this 50% chance of
having this fatal brain disease, I wanted to put that in. There's a number, it's based
on the repetitions in a single strand of DNA. I gave that all to an editor and I
see it like, you read this column and you sow it back into the film, and so my
situation flows underneath the skin of Donald's, and me and him are kind of like
let's say married together within a single strip of film, so it's this homage
to an artist who taught me so much about what it means to fight for others as a
way to get out of your own self and because others are more important than you.