Here is Elsewhere is a new work in two parts by artist-filmmaker Sarah Wood, that was commissioned by Kettle’s Yard during lockdown.
An essay film that weaves together a range of archive footage to explore the ways in which our minds, during a period of unprecedented isolation, might be adjusting in order to make sense of the constraints and restrictions to movement that have been placed on society. The film suggests that we have become ‘nomads of the imagination’; our minds reaching out to other people and places while we are apart.
“Right now, for the preservation of life, the citizen is being asked to isolate by staying remote and staying still. Stillness and fixity after an age of speed and motion – it’s quite a shock. Later art can analyse this time; now it can only chronicle it, notice the way in which, in unprecedented times, new phenomena surprise us.
Here’s one. In a sudden and involuntary response to stillness, people are starting to travel without moving. People are voyaging in their minds to visualize places remote from the ones they inhabit. Stillness and fixity, it seems, have unleashed the volition and freedom of our imaginations. Our minds are supplying what the world cannot: waking visions, nighttime dreams, compensating for our circumscribed existence – healing us by making associations. Overnight we’ve become nomads of the imagination – our minds reaching out to others across the world”.
The film was commissioned by Kettle’s Yard and was made possible through the generous support of Sabine Jaccaud, Carol Atack & Alex van Someren, and Porthmeor Fund.
Director: Sarah Wood. UK, 11 mins, 2020, video
