Film screening, followed by a session with director Andrew Kötting as he leads a discussion on his film making journeys through landscape. With music, sound and visuals in the Cafe Bar by ¡hen~dø av bafflement solutions.
By Our Selves documents a four-day walk made by the English Poet John Clare. Toby Jones, Iain Sinclair and a Straw Bear follow in his footsteps exactly 150 years after his death.
En route they bump into Macgillivray, Dr Simon Kovesi and the wizard Alan Moore. Meantime the journey is narrated by Toby’s father Freddie, a maverick actor who featured in numerous David Lynch films. John Clare’s escape from Epping Forest, an epic march through hunger and madness, is an English journey to sit beside A Pilgrim’s Progress. Andrew Kötting, hyperkinetic camper-van captain of Gallivant, sets out in hot pursuit, dressed as a Straw Bear. Father and son, Freddie and Toby Jones, are possessed by the spirit of Clare, and locked in Beckettian embrace: one all-voice and one all-mute.
The writer Iain Sinclair watches from the shadows, Alan Moore waits like a bearded figure of fate in Northampton and Dr Simon Kovesi hands out the medicine. Captured in lustrous black and white photography, they discover the only truth of the road; whatever our hopes and delusions, we are always By Our Selves.
Live sound and visuals by ¡hen~dø av bafflement solutions will follow in Arnolfini’s cafe bar, providing a soundtrack to moving image works that seek connections with landscape by unconventional means.
Andrew Kötting is an award winning filmmaker, artist and Professor of Time Based Media at The University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury. After leaving school he worked as a scrap metal dealer and then as a lumberjack in Scandinavia before returning to college to study Fine Art. He graduated from The Slade in London with an MA. He made numerous short films, which were awarded prizes at international film festivals before making his idiosyncratic first feature-film Gallivant (1996); a four-month journey around the coast of Britain, in which he was accompanied by his octogenarian grandmother Gladys and his daughter Eden. Subsequent feature films include This Filthy Earth in 2001, Ivul in 2009, This is our Still Life in 2011 and Swandown in 2012. His films are in the collections of Arts Council Great Britain and Centre Pompidou, France. He currently lives and works between Fougax-et-Barrineuf in the French Pyrenees and St Leonards-on-Sea on the south coast of England where he has just finished editing his new feature film By Our Selves, a collaboration with the writer Iain Sinclair and the actor Toby Jones.
¡hen~dø av bafflement solutions emerged from late night experiments at the Cube Microplex, the artist-run cinema which has long held Andrew Kötting close to its heart. The group create a fugitive Cube-like space where both audience and performers can lose themselves via the discipline of DJing approached as mischievous disruption, incorporating improvised internet manipulations alongside physical vinyl hacks.
Richard Long: TIME AND SPACE
This event accompanies the major exhibition TIME AND SPACE by Richard Long at Arnolfini, that explores the artist’s enduring relationship with the landscape of Bristol and the South West – a starting point for so many of his iconic works. This exhibition will bring together recreations of previous important works and entirely new commissions, both in the gallery and on The Downs, where the artist spent much of his childhood. A programme of events accompanies the exhibition and offsite commission, including walks, talks and conversations, family events, screenings and performances. Read more…
This event is produced in collaboration with ONOMATO and Arnolfini.
This event is part of the Art Weekender – Bristol and Bath.
