Collaboration with artist and writer Michaële Cutaya — with thanks to the Tim Robinson Archive, NUIG
Our artistic project The Littoral Flâneuses emerged and developed around a series of impromptu encounters. In 2018, We began this collaboration in response to an open call, bringing together our photographic and writing practices as well as a shared interest with how to walk the earth. In turn, our ideas began to aggregate through the encounter of a figure and a concept: the figure was that of the flâneur or, as the case may be, the flâneuse, and the concept was that of Smooth space.
We are currently working on a short film bringing together, texts, analogue photographs and video footage of performative walks.
An encounter shaped our project further: we made contact with Dr Nessa Cronin and she offered us access to Tim Robinson’s archive in the Special Collections of the NUIG library. We thus began photographing and exploring these fascinating maps which led our project into new directions.
We were also invited by curator Kate Strain to contribute to a film which she was developing with artist Elisabeth von Samsonow for the TULCA-Galway 2020 UnSelfing programme, A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift. Inspired by this experience we recently decided to continue to work with Eavan Aiken and Michelle Doyle to develop this film.
To play further with superimposition of texts and maps over filmed footage of us, to speed up the film to exaggerate the precarious nature of our bodies moving along the line, to perform different manners of moving: whether falling or crawling – a becoming-woman / a becoming-animal. To play with the surface-tension of the film as much as with the surface of the shore.