Single screen film (8mins/stereo)
We Record Ourselves is a screendance by Simon Ellis, Natalia Barua, Owa Barua and Katrina McPherson. The film was made in response to two related events: 1) the failed attempt in 1997 by McPherson to get a film commission about the largely overlooked work and life of dance artist Margaret Morris;1 2) a request made to McPherson by Horsecross Arts (Perth, Scotland) in 2015 to respond to the Margaret Morris archive.
The research is an original concatenation of screendance and archival practices that reveals ideas, practices and experiences to do with memory and disappearance, the performance and recording of contemporary human lives, experimental screendance practices, and the ghosts of our artistic influences.
The work was developed through practice-research in which the artists created and sustained a series of unique performance-as-archive practices. These practices involved the four artists working together collaboratively and simultaneously as performers, archivists, camera operators and editors. The multi-perspective materials, screens, bodies, and texts in the film are a distinctive collection of moving images — part performance, part archive, and part screendance – that together function “as the kind of bodily transmission conventional archivists dread.”2
Production Credits:
Commission: Horsecross Arts for Threshold artspace
Length: Single screen: 8:25 minutes; 22 screen: 5 minutes; MediaWall edit: 8 minutes
Première: Movement exhibition, 15 Oct 2016 — 15 Jan 2017 at Threshold Artspace, Perth Concert Hall, Scotland. Movement: an homage to Margaret Morris in drama, dance, music and film; curated by Iliyana Nedkova and Wendy Timmons
Acquisition: Horsecross Arts collection of contemporary art
Project website: https://www.skellis.net/we-record-ourselves/
Presentations:
Prizes: Winner, the “MediaWall” competition for the Journal of Media Practice and MeCCSA Practice Network Annual Symposium. It was then re-edited for the 7m tall Bath Spa MediaWall and screened on 8 June 2017.
We Record Ourselves was also re-developed as two other versions: a twenty-two screen edit presented at Threshold Artspace, and an eight screen media-wall edit (7m high) presented at Bath Spa MediaWall.
Twenty-two screen format:
Schneider, R. (2011) Performing Remains. New York: Routledge, p.105↩︎