Charlotte Prodger is a British artist working with moving and printed image, sculpture and writing. Her work explores issues surrounding queer identity, landscape, language, technology and time, and while the themes in her work aren't completely the same as mine, the way she speaks about the body in relation to the camera is something I found really interesting. Below are some notes from the video interview:
On BRIDGIT:
- the use of the iPhone to film the work brings an "almost sculptural" element into the composition; fingers get in the way, we can see the transparency and inner circulation of the fingertips; the microphone is affected physically by the wind; static shots move with the breath of the camera holder
- "The systems of the body are enmeshed with the camera"
- the landscape is not homogenous or "a single romantic blob".
- Cities are generally more individuated when captured, "there's an impulse to try and identify that space... Rather than depicting landscape generically, I try to foreground subjectivity in the form of personal voice-over to explore landscapes as the distinct individual locations that they are"; highlights the importance of the place in the work through this
- Prodger explores self-determination in relation to bodies and geography, both personally through her support of Scottish independence and queer identity, and the content of her work. The importance of self determination in the histories of queer struggles and spaces, commodification of the queer aesthetic in fashion, music and the art world is an issue - by lifting those aesthetics, there's an emptying of the politics that was so important.
- voice overs: asks friends and family, people who she feels an affinity for, to read out her own diaristic content; making a matrix for these seemingly disparate fragments of text and spoken narrative into, an equal footing of dialogue with one another; less a linear mapped history of progress, but holding these things alongside one another
- "fragments of these histories are enfolded within me, the histories of older queer figures... that isn't static, it's contingent...unfolding... as I move forward in my life. I look for them for context and validation and I need them to feel grounded in who I am"
More about the work:
BRIDGIT
UK, 2018 32 minutes, HD Video
BRIDGIT takes its title from the eponymous Neolithic deity, whose name has numerous iterations depending on life stage, locality and point in history. BRIDGIT explores the shifting temporal interrelations of name, body, and landscape through the work’s narratives where “… the force of time is not just a contingent characteristic of living, but is the dynamic impetus that enables life to become, to always be in the process of becoming, something other than it was” (Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power by Elizabeth Grosz). In this new work, Prodger focuses on female attachments – a process of identification that includes friends and shape-shifting deities amongst other figures of admiration. Prodger habitually names her hard drives after personally influential older figures she wants to have in her daily working orbit. At one point during BRIDGIT, her panning camera reveals the icon of a flash drive she has named after a set of recordings by musician Alice Coltrane under the moniker Turiya. Later, in quoting the virtual systems theorist and pioneer of transgender studies Sandy Stone, Prodger cites her different names (Sandy Stone, Allucquére Rosanne Stone, Allucquére Rosanne “Sandy” Stone) as extended embodiments and multiple subjectivities spanning time and space. One of the many myths surrounding Bridgit is of her birth – which is said to have taken place in a doorway, the threshold of inside and out – a transitional space that in Neolithic terms represented the moment of shift from nomadic existence to domesticated agriculture. The footage moves between the domestic interior of Prodger’s home in Glasgow to various locations in the Scottish Highlands where Prodger has worked, as well as transit between. Alongside the film’s voices, the diegetic soundtrack spans these locations with rural soundscapes and incidental background music indoors. BRIDGIT is shot entirely on Prodger’s i-Phone, which she uses as part of day-to-day life, accumulating an ongoing archive. This work utilises some of that archive of footage, just as past works such as Stonymollan Trail (2015) have done. By utilising the device prosthetically, the technology becomes an extension of the nervous system whilst also providing an intimate connection to global social interaction and work – dissolving the threshold between day to day life and the conventions of production. For Prodger the iPhone presents a set of rigorous formal parameters not unlike her previous explorations in 16mm. Where 16mm film has a fixed length (eg 100ft rolls), the iPhone has data storage limitations that constrain her shots to roughly 4 minutes in length and under, just slightly longer than a roll of film. Through image and interweaving narratives the video explores multiple registers of bodily time: the arc of Prodger’s own life; the period of a year she took to make the piece; the real-time of industrial and civic transportation; the clockwork rhythm of the medical institution; the temporality of socio-political movements that bridge between individual lives and generations, and the vast time of prehistory.
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