Sam, John, James, Kimal

To “walk” is a versatile verb with a range of possibilities that represent a journey of both an external and an internal kind. Sometimes for practical reasons, sometimes for physical or psychological ones. Through walking you can access meditative states—“flow states” or “zones”—that you wouldn’t have been able to visit any other way. Att gå in Swedish, to walk, to stroll—or my preferred form, walking (as the “-ing” ending carries with it the verb; to be in the middle of something)—is a gesture and activity that describes a longer process that cannot be reduced to a single step or moment. In my view, this is related to la durée or “duration,” as conceived by the philosopher Henri Bergson, who says that our perception is constantly being shaped by memory. This is to say, there is a span of—for lack of a better word—time embedded in what we perceive as the present, and this span, which is also a kind of movement, is what he calls la durée.

By exploring the memory and rhythm that is generated by walking, I want to clarify how they relate to film and why film is an important part of my artistic practice. Bergson believes that film contributes to a false perception of what movement actually is. What we perceive as the moving image or film is actually a series of still images that are exchanged at a particular pace, and our eye perceives this as movement. Whereas film can at best provide fragments of a sequence of events, our body in a state of walking can capture a space of time that cannot be reached by way of shortcut.

I agree with Bergson that film is not an entirely true translation of movement, but there are other aspects of this medium that I find intriguing. In between each still image is a small moment that gets lost—the technology cannot access it, whether the camera is shooting at 18, 24, or 29.97 frames per second. This loss is not necessarily something that I dislike; I think I see opportunity in these limitations, because the moments that are not captured by the camera or deliberately not selected during the filmmaking process carry other opportunities.

The desert landscape on a map can appear as a gap, void or a non-place. When illustrated, it is almost entirely sand, and great care is taken to emphasize how vast and desolate it is. But where just as I see possibilities in the voids between the stills in a movie, I also see possibilities in the vast desolation that is the desert. This is highlighted in the piece my work Sam, John, James, Kimal, in which Sam takes her time crossing the desert and allows herself to be surprised by who she meets, and the story develops accordingly, despite the desert being a place that is often mistaken for a void