Short film shot&edited in a devising collaborative process, RCSSD, London, 2019
Starting from the story of Salome by Oscar Wilde, the short film is portraying her self-repressive journey in combating desire, which she initially doesn't fully understand and the impact of the gaze of others. It explores her inner mind journey through materials and textures.
To listen to different types of materiality with eyes open or closed. To feel with the hands, with the fingers, with the skin, to respond to them with a movement. To respond from memory of touch, of smell. To use texture as feeling, as emotion. Sound of the material as an action, as a response, as an inner tumult. Tactile and sensorial based. Moving with the object, movements generated by the shape and the form of the object. Different rhytms and tones according to them. Materials that can tell a story, narratives through objects. What’s the relationship between body – object – story? Body – space – image. How can you incapsulate time in a material? The power of the sound of the material. Power of silence. Gesture of textures through silence, enhanced notes. Exploring all the possibilities, while filming and documenting everything on camera.
During the first stages of the process I started wearing the materials, moving with them and trying to understand their anatomy. I was aware of the possibilities and also the restrictions that my body had while interacting with them. I started exploring the boundaries of the textures, pushing as far as I can go. The material was dictating the gestures, but I also tried to slowly fuse my narrative and persona in it. With this exercise, we tried to delve into Strauss’s Salome, bringing it into all these fabrics. With the help of the coreographer and director, we started the storytelling process. When I was behind the camera, maneuvering it, I discovered that the boundaries that I thought were fixed, established while moving along wearing the materials, changed and expounded. The camera could capture details that the bare eye couldn’t. It could also capture sound an attribute it to a specific detailed image. The possibilities seemed almost endless. Along this process I became interested even more in how an object can communicate a narrative, a feeling, a sound, an image. I started analysing the relationship that occurs between bodies and objects and how they affect one another.
There are a certain amount of qualities that can be attributed and discovered from an object determined by the angle from which it is looked from. “Read objects as a score/Imagine them giving you instructions”. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”: “Things have a life of their own. It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.”