YOU CALL IT SUNDEW (2020) is my archival film supported by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art as part of the two year public programme In Steps of Sundew, with materials from Corby Borough Council and the BFI. It is an excavation of the moving image archives of the Corby steelworks, the Sundew walking dragline, and the PLUTO pipeline - particularly the four original films, which acted as a pastoral symphony for the steel industry and its machine “animals”. This film, made in June-Aug 2020, explores the human and nonhuman elements of the landscape excavations, mining, and acts of naming/language. The project involves re-mixing the archives and creating new sound and footage about extractive politics, multi-species storytelling, limestone, fossils, factory symphonies, carnivorous plants, underwater warfare, and the techno-masculinist voices of the Anthropocene. It can be watched online here, while the score has been released as the album Forgerons et Alchimistes on Bandcamp here. The metallurgical score/digital album is inspired by Jane Bennett's writing on 'the life of metal' from the point of view of metal - 'a continuous melody of copper', or the unstable vitality of 'these filmy sheathes...like wisps of fog', as well as Mircea Eliade's work on the temporality of these 'celestial metals'. The sound worlds of the archive collide with lost choruses of metal fatigue and underwater sea change, as well as ideas of shift work, alloys, and singing 'in the round'. You can also order a limited artist’s edition, with a one-off silver halide emulsion print made as part of the process of metallic re-animation and painting from the moving image archives.
