The Changing Mind of Present (2014)
HD Video, 8 mins
The film questions some of the basic assumptions we make about the objects that surround us. What from the past do we keep, and what do we reject? What do we collect, and what collections are we ourselves part of? The film interweaves footage of objects and specimens held in ethnographic and natural history collections, conservation techniques used at London’s Natural History Museum, and the ancient practice of tightrope walking in Seseña, a newly built town on the outskirts of Madrid that went bankrupt during the 2008 financial crisis and now stands largely deserted. The connection between these places and practices lies in their attempts to resist uncertainty. A collection preserves an object by removing it from the conditions in which it once existed. Tightrope walking creates a direct route across a gap, but the crossing remains precarious. Seseña was built around the promise of a future that never arrived. A preserved object is no longer simply the thing itself. It becomes evidence of another time, detached from its original use and context. The film looks at how such objects are organised and preserved at a time of expanding digital technologies and unstable financial systems, while asking what it means to try to secure anything against an uncertain future.
HD Video, 8 mins
The film questions some of the basic assumptions we make about the objects that surround us. What from the past do we keep, and what do we reject? What do we collect, and what collections are we ourselves part of? The film interweaves footage of objects and specimens held in ethnographic and natural history collections, conservation techniques used at London’s Natural History Museum, and the ancient practice of tightrope walking in Seseña, a newly built town on the outskirts of Madrid that went bankrupt during the 2008 financial crisis and now stands largely deserted. The connection between these places and practices lies in their attempts to resist uncertainty. A collection preserves an object by removing it from the conditions in which it once existed. Tightrope walking creates a direct route across a gap, but the crossing remains precarious. Seseña was built around the promise of a future that never arrived. A preserved object is no longer simply the thing itself. It becomes evidence of another time, detached from its original use and context. The film looks at how such objects are organised and preserved at a time of expanding digital technologies and unstable financial systems, while asking what it means to try to secure anything against an uncertain future.