Wayfaring Stranger + in conversation on practice with Larry Achiampong

My new film Wayfaring Stranger (2024, 69mins) was officially premiered at the British Film Institute, at NFT 1, on the 7th December. I did an introduction outlining the project and artist, filmmaker Larry Achiampong and I were in conversation after the screening. We outlined working outside the mainstream filmmaking apparatus, working with marginalised histories and counter-memories. We spoke about collectivity, generosity in practice, and how our works speak to a need for such care, respect, vulnerability and what it means to make from life. We spoke of gendered and racialised landscapes and of making a life, knowing the structural injustices present in all our lives.

I introduced the film as follows: "Wayfaring Stranger was made by and with people - both in front of and behind the camera - who have all had to find their own way in the world, often amidst challenging circumstances, and even against the odds.

All of us have experienced violence in its various forms. For some this has been prolonged.

This was the beginning. How to make a viable life when that seemed far from a given.

How to move beyond language to the thing itself. How to see landscape as both a place and what it conceals - what has happened to it and to those within it.

How to really see, how to make a community, how to choose.

That we are able to make the film - and show it here - is a privilege that has been denied to so many in the spaces of their own lives - those abused, marginalised, exploited, expelled, erased by the interwoven systems we live under.
To be here with you, and to be able to show work made collectively with a wish for an equally collective life, from the human to the ecological, is a very special thing.

I hope you can enter this film without preconceptions and find a space for yourselves in it.

I'd like to give my deepest thanks to everyone who made it with me and especially now to thank the incredible sound designer Chris Watson, whose unique and extraordinary archive holds the amazing richness of the world's natural sounds, including the voices and songs of species that are no longer with us.
Chris and I strived to create a subtle symphony of the world around us.

A world where there are no more genocides, where there are no more people whose lives are cut short by weapons whose production we in this country directly profit from. A world where a living being means more than a dead life is profitable.

And perhaps somewhere in it lies the hope that Arundhati Roy spoke of when she wrote -

'Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.'

I look forward very much to any thoughts you might have
when Larry and I speak after the screening.
It is another great privilege to be able to share a conversation with such a committed artist and deeply compassionate person.

Thank you so much for coming
and I do hope you enjoy Wayfaring Stranger".

ALZ, 7/12/24

• https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/...
• https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/defaul...
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