Output details

Crystal & Flame, Video and Sound Installation

Crystal & Flame was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella in 2010 and premiered at PEER, London. This work took its contextual cue from Italo Calvino’s, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which analyses the properties of the crystal and the flame, using them metaphorically to represent the polarities in human conditions, and the geometries of their relationships that are set within the urban environment. I decided to juxtapose three separate contrasting and complimentary elements. The first one unravels the cutting and polishing of a precious stone thus imbuing it with a value in the process. The second component presents a conversation between diners at a Turkish restaurant in North London, where a narrator tells a projected film scenario about an alternate economy of smuggling that employs children to smuggle goods on donkeys’ backs between the landmine strewn Turkish and Syrian border, resulting in inevitable death. The third culminating part depicts the faceted construct of a rehearsal for a new theatre play, an adaptation of the short story by Chekhov, ‘The House with the Mezzanine,’ apparently never adapted for theatre. In the original Chekhov story there is a lot of subtext that I wanted to recontextualise and examine against contemporary understanding of the relationship between cultural production, class systems and labour, and I worked closely with the scriptwriter on several parts of the script. Furthermore the idea was to observe how the least visual of artistic languages – theatre, imbues words with emotions in the process of rehearsing and the use of gestures. Overall the project aspires to expose the liminal zones set within the everyday and the complexities of human relationships.

The output is presented via portfolio, which should be viewed in order to gain a proper understanding of the research.