Get It Out The Mud!

An immersive moving image installation and multisensory performance work exploring ritual, sensuality and rebirth within the Thames mud. The foreshore of the Thames is an organic, constantly shifting mass – digesting and regurgitating, listening and echoing back. Get It Out The Mud! is an experimental moving image work that acts as a messenger to these slippages through projections, sound, scent and performance.

  • Joseph June Bond
    Director
  • Anna Patarakina
    Director of Photography
  • Deniz Yildiz
    1st Camera Assistant
  • Joseph June Bond
    Additional 8mm & 16mm Film
  • Jade Adeyemi
    Assistant Director
  • Anna Lann
    Original Composition
  • Joseph June Bond
    Original Composition
  • Anna Lann
    Sound Design
  • Josh Homer
    Editor
  • Myles Bevan
    Colourist
  • Adama Jalloh
    Stills Photography
  • Maisy Bliss
    Graphic Design
  • Joseph June Bond
    Styling & Nails
  • Project Type:
    Experimental
  • Runtime:
    11 hours 11 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    March 26, 2022
  • Production Budget:
    5,000 GBP
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    United Kingdom
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital, RED, 16mm, 8mm,
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
  • ICA Image Behaviour 2022
    London
    United Kingdom
    March 26, 2022
    World Premiere
    ICA Image Behaviour Commission
Director Biography - Joseph June Bond

Joseph June Bond is an artist, community organiser and basketball coach. Their interdisciplinary practice centres intergenerational knowledge sharing and collaboration through practical workshops, sports methodologies and open source resources.

Joseph's recent research and projects explore bodies of fluid, fluid bodies and body fluids as porous repositories of ritual, movement and sound. They work predominantly within site-specific contexts and peer-to-peer platforms including artist run spaces, online radio and DIY communities.

Joseph facilitates a weekly, inclusive space for women, non-binary and trans people to play basketball in London.

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Director Statement

Get It Out The Mud! began unfurling during a research and development residency as part of Siobhan Davies Studios’ Percolate Programme in 2021. The week-long communing of artists, athletes, movement therapists, collaborators and mentors explored forms of physical resistance and warping on the body. Rather than performing choreography, or something that it knows, this body is figuring it out, finding its way and failing often.

During lockdown, I spent nearly every low tide mudlarking (scavenging the exposed riverbed for lost or discarded things) on the Thames foreshore. Abundant spirits stir within these temporal, tidal spaces along the Thames, where the sea transforms into the city. They’ve always been portals through which a perceived otherness, unknowns and futures have emerged into the heart of London.

Mud is this material of strange, glorious consistencies that place resistance, weight and drag on the body. It’s a messenger, an ear and a digestive system that swallows these slivers of historical, cultural and spiritual sediment and then, twice a day at high tide, regurgitates them in constellations.

Get It Out The Mud! is of, about and for bodies: fluid bodies, precarious bodies, queer bodies. It’s a body itself too - the wriggling reels of 16mm and 8mm film are its intestines. Their textural markings are a delicious tonic of body fluids, scavenged natural pigments, rubbings of the foreshore, and pollutants in the Thames.

As an installation, Get It Out The Mud! is the lone source of light - a moon perhaps - the projection is leaky, porous and flows out into the darkness of the space onto the bodies of the performers and through the audience cruising the space. The moving image is never wholly captured or held by the permeable, translucent gauze, so there’s a suppleness and fluidity. It dances in the space like silt, releasing these moments of thick, sensuous darkness and womb-like warmth through which sound, scent and touch can spill. Juniper is burned here to arouse the senses and ward off evil spirits, as it has been throughout British folklore.