Art Station Film is a diverse monthly film screening of artist films selected and curated by filmmaker Emily Richardson.
We’re pleased to present a selection of films by artist filmmaker Rhea Storr, who explores the representation of Black and mixed-race cultures. She uses masquerade as a site of protest or subversion as an ongoing theme in her work and looks at the effect of place or space on cultural representation, often drawing on her own rural Norfolk upbringing and British Bahamian heritage.
Rhea Storr often works in 16mm film; she considers that analogue film might be useful to Black artists, both in the aesthetics it creates and the production models it facilitates. She is currently undertaking a PhD entitled ‘Towards a Black British Aesthetic: How is Black Radical Imagination realised through 16mm filmmaking practices?’. She is a co-director of Not Nowhere, an artists’ film co-operative, London, that focuses on analogue film. Rhea Storr is also a resident at Somerst House, London, and occasionally programs at Alchemy Film and Moving image Festival. She is the winner of Aesthetica Art Prize 2020 and the inaugural Louis Le Prince Experimental Film Prize.
Screening three films: ‘A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message,’ ‘The Image That Spits, The Eye That Accumulates,’ and ‘Here Is The Imagination of The Black Radical’. See below for more info.
Friday 18th October, 7pm
The Old Bank, Saxmundham, IP17 1AE.
Tickets: £10*
*donation to Art Station’s art & learning programme.
A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message (2018) shows how celebration is a protest at Leeds West Indian Carnival. This film examines forms of authority and asks who is really performing. Following Mama Dread’s, a troupe whose carnival theme is Caribbean immigration to the UK, we are asked to consider the visibility of black bodies, particularly in rural spaces.
Book Tickets HereThe Image That Spits, The Eye That Accumulates (2017), Voiceover: Deborah Eckman.
‘The image that spits is the image which violently rejects me but sits beside me nonetheless. You can’t see it here. I cannot voice it’. A body acquires language. It must negotiate the eroding Norfolk landscape, images of the landscape and other bodies. As notions of ‘I’ and ‘other’ disintegrate, the images become unstable, unreliable and the effects of coastal erosion become clear.
Film or digital; an embodied camera or passive observer, the images are inadequate. The film stock has eroded too. Kodachrome film was once hailed for its vibrant colours and archival properties but is now only able to be developed in black and white. Through a convoluted process of coloured filters, Rhea Storr has restored colour to the film. However, anything which moves does not retain its proper colour. History is for those who have the means to fix themselves.
Book Tickets HereHere Is The Imagination of The Black Radical (2020), observes how Afrofuturism is communicated via the Bahamian people through Junkanoo, a form of carnival in the Bahamas. Originally celebrated by slaves who were given Christmas Day and Boxing Day off only, Junkanoo can be viewed as a form of resistance. The film follows the ‘Shell Saxon Superstars’ as they prepare.
The 1500-person-strong group, the Saxons come together in spectacular fashion to enact a politically motivated theme, asserting national pride, or depicting other countries. During this film, you will visit the shacks where the costumes are made, to observe the craftsmanship and dedication required to win the parade and obtain ‘bragging rights’.
The soundtrack has many layers and is comprised mostly of samples, much like 16mm film images, analogue sounds (chiefly static and radio) are used to obscure a seemingly obtainable message. Too often Sun Ra’s ‘Space is the Place’ is co-opted to merely refer to space travel- bypassing its assertion of the power of Black culture. Actual space agency sounds are juxtaposed with interviews with the Saxons. In doing so, the work roots an Afrofuturist aesthetic with the Bahamian people.
Book Tickets Here