Changes in Light

Changes in Light (screendance 18m 32) was made by dance artist/scholar Anna Macdonald during her time as Practitioner in residence at Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, the largest law library in Europe. It focuses on the library’s decolonising work moving Commonwealth law materials from basement spaces to more central parts of the library. Drawing on Julietta Singh's text "Unthinking Mastery" (2018), the film explores ways of resisting what Singh describes as the sense of timelessness associated with colonial mastery, both within the affective organization of legal knowledge within the library and the ontic form of screendance itself. The images in the film, captured by Macdonald and videographer Marisa Zanotti, emerged from movement workshops with library staff which focused on the embodied experience of different parts of the library. During the workshops, staff were invited to think about their relationship to change and how a sense of movement, a sense of the possibility of change, might be created.

• https://vimeo.com/1037379860