(Untitled) Eyemo rolls
Aotearoa New Zealand, Argentina, Canada, Chile, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, USA, UK
35mm, colour, silent, 2011 – ongoing
Eyemo roll #1 (Dec 2011, USA) – roll #204 (Dec 2017, Chile)
Since 2011 I began travelling with a Bell & Howell Eyemo 35mm film camera shooting in different countries where I have lived for a time. More and more my memory and experience of works is coloured by the places and the people with whom I encountered them. Untitled (Eyemo rolls) is an ongoing project exploring temporary linkages between different places, times and people, inviting connections and blurring boundaries between disparate territories. The project is a way to think about entanglement and the cinema as a locality between places.
The project is being built from short camera rolls ranging from 40 seconds to 1 min 20 seconds. These camera rolls fit onto the 100ft daylight spool of the Eyemo camera. Since December 2011 when I started the project I have shot over 200 rolls for this project. Yet these rolls are designed only to be shown only in dialogue with works drawn from places i have lived interspersed with selected rolls from this project. Each work is drawn from a particular geography but also blurs the line between them.
The writer Julio Cortazar, a master of the blurred boundary, wrote the majority of his work in exile in Paris. His writing has been crucial for this project as a way to think about the experience of being between places as I have worked on this film. In an interview about his novel Hopscotch, in which the reader is free to read 155 chapters in any order they choose, he stated that ‘the book doesn’t propose any solution; it simply limits itself to showing the possible paths one can take to knock down the wall, to see what’s on the other side.’
The project has been presented at the 25FPS Festival, Zagreb, Visions, Montreal, BIMI/LUX, London, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art. Each screening has seen the rolls in different configurations responding to the place and development of the project.
Films in Place of Places 25FPS Festival
Zagreb, Croatia, 30 September 2016
Eyemo rolls shown with work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Joanna Margaret Paul, Mok Chui-Yu, Chick Strand, Tito & Tita and Peter Hutton.
Untitled (Eyemo Rolls) Visions
Montreal, Canada, 30 April 2017
Eyemo rolls shown with work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Louise Menzies, Chen Chieh-jen, Mok Chui-Yu, Laida Lexthundi, Chick Strand and Tito & Tita.
It’s oblique but it’s all there BIMI / LUX
London, UK 2 June 2017
Eyemo rolls shown with work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Shannon Te Ao, Chen Chieh-jen, Mok Chui-Yu, Chris Langdon & Fred Worden, Chick Strand and Tito & Tita.
LUX event page
Asian Film and Video Art Forum
Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art / MMCA
Seoul, South Korea, 30 Sept 2017 – 8 Oct 2017
Eyemo rolls shown at invitation of curator Xin Zhou with works by Sow Yee Au, Hsu Chia Wei, Hao Jingban and Mok Chiu-Yu.
Es oblicuo pero está todo ahí / It’s oblique but it’s all there
Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 24 November 2017
Eyemo rolls shown with work by Tanatchai Bandasak, Shannon Te Ao, Chen Chieh-jen, Mok Chui-Yu, Laida Lexthundi, Chick Strand and Tito & Tita.
Like a boat floating in the moonlight / 像一隻船 在月夜裡搖呀搖
2018 Taiwan Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art
Taichung, Taiwan, 6 October 2018
Eyemo Rolls shown in special programme for 2018 Taiwan Biennial: Wild Rhizome, with work by Chang Chao-tang, Richard Yao-chi Chen, Mok Chui-yu & Li Ching, Shannon Te Ao, Chen Chieh-jen, Raúl Ruiz and CADA/Colectivo Acciones de Arte.
Sites & Rites
Irish Film Institute with aemi, Dublin, 30 October 2019
Eyemo rolls programme considering contested territories and ritual actions with works by Mok Chui-Yu, Barbara McCullough, Tito & Tita, Shannon Te Ao and Ismal Muntaha.