Sarah Turner on Ecology

Wednesday 7 May
7 - 8pm
Margate Media Centre, 11-13 King Street, Margate
Free
Booking recommended, email hello@margaterocks.com

On Wednesday 7 May, Sarah Turner will screen extracts of her film, Ecology, and discuss some of the concerns that informed the making of the work…

Ecology, is an experimental feature film composed of three sequences; three characters and three stories which can be screened in any order. Each story is an internal monologue from the point of view of three family members; a mother, daughter and son, and set in the same location, Andratx, Majorca, though not all at the same time. In each sequence fairly anodyne family rituals of showering, cooking, eating, cleaning are re-enacted and repeated. However, the family’s presence in the location is the result of a central event which remains avoided and unspoken; a moment of alcohol-related violence which has led to the son’s detention. This repressed violence or violent repression erupts differently in each sequence – a glass is smashed, there’s blood in the food. A glass is crushed, food is vomited out.

Ecology takes the three themes of the environment, familial psychic structures and technology as critical sites of crisis and change in the present moment, and insists that we consider them together. The location of Majorca invokes the optimism of ‘holiday’, but the site is in fact a drought zone where the sun is oppressive and water is a scarce and rare resource. The ‘holiday’ is a literal relocation, but one where the conventions of the everyday are overturned, the primal needs for survival mirroring the psychic needs struggled for within the family. The inevitable recycling of water is conceptually mirrored in the recycling of emotional violence, requiring that we reconsider ‘waste’, ‘need’ and ‘survival’, and suggesting that familial existence is as precarious an ecology as the environment.

The use of film technologies consolidates this theme. Shot on multiple formats including stills, Super 8, DV and mobile phones – technologies that live inside one another as they evolve – the imaging of the film is a struggle for stability and consistency. Filmic conventions are played out in digital form, but the effects of recycling old methods of framing, lighting and focus are allowed to misfire. Circularity rather than linear progression characterises a new way of understanding technologies, psychic structures and the environment. Importantly, this is reproduced in the exhibition of the film; the three separate yet interdependent sequences are mastered on DVD and authored to run on autoflow - the sequences can be screened in any order and exhibitors determine the sequence progression. Thus, the instability and circularity of the film’s themes is played out at every screening.
_{Image: Ecology, 2007 (still) © Sarah Turner}