toffee, 2022
Digital video, colour/sound, loop of 9’6” (digital projection on MDF painted screen leant against gallery wall, screen size: 2.440 x 1.220 x 0.012m, stereo speakers)
Installation view: Skylight Gallery, KhiO, Oslo, NO
- The catalyst for this work is 45 seconds of footage I shot of my good friend Felix, who is transgender & has synesthesia, demonstrating to camera a ‘checklist’ of all the joints in her body she unconsciously ‘cracks’ daily. To expand upon this material (as we no longer live in the same city), the two of us entered into an exchange of voice-notes. These attempts to unravel her logic behind needing to ‘crack’ her body form the basis of the work’s audio. Joint cracking, synesthesia & gender are all somehow interrelated for Felix. She describes her sound-sight hybrid synesthetic experiences (which she has known since a child) as, “...being something & nothing & two things at the same time...[& how they] actually really reinforced [her to] explor[e] gender a bit more.” Also, “...toffee...is the first colour, texture, sound match”, she associates with her ‘cracking’, hence the title & the colour/texture of the visual.
Toffee is very malleable & just like the body it can change state, from soft to brittle depending on temperature. The only remnants from my original ‘eyewitness’ account are the audible ‘cracks’ picked up by the camera’s microphone. All visual recording is replaced with texture produced from painting directly onto 16mm film strips. Digitally refilming this texture as I watched it play back on the Steenbeck works to create an irregular rhythm. Interrupting painted sections with blank frames throughout the strip caused my camera to struggle with autofocusing. By aligning audible ‘cracks’ with these white voids I want to recreate the feeling of losing yourself in something. Narrative starts to appear through the ‘cracks’, producing a very embodied response from the viewer. I want the viewer to feel every ‘crack’ in the film, so that any sense of absence is felt in the body.
^ Video still
^ Production image