A Place Less Imaginable
Moving image installation / DV Video 2008 15 minutes / Contact for full video
Supported by ArtsadminBased on The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas – a short story by Ursula Le Guin - A Place Less Imaginable is speculative fiction. Its narrative offers the listener a glimpse of a dystopian near future in which a solitary child lives as a scapegoat in wretched confinement allowing the rest of the community to enjoy their everyday happiness. Set in a familiar-seeming world the listener is immersed in the description of this all too imaginable community in which almost all of the privileged choose to ignore the sacrifice made by the one for the many.
The text is read by actor Gerard Bell and is accompanied by an image of leaf shadows on a garden wall. Obliquely supported by the imagery, the video's narrative is left to unfold in the mind of the viewer.
As an installation A Place Less Imaginable is sited in a cleaning cupboard and is viewed through a black and white, domestic TV - the kind that might be a left-over from a previous era and now relegated to storage. The video loop is triggered by the viewer opening the door to the cupboard and ends when the door is closed. The work has been installed in cleaning cupboards including 13 Gladstone Place as part of Brighton Open House, 2008; What Now Festival, Siobhan Davies Studios, London 2008 and Nottdance dialogues, Nottingham, 2008.
Credits
Voice: Gerard Bell
Technical collaboration: Steve Wald