Unhomely Street: The unconscious and the city

GENT, Susannah (2018). Unhomely Street: The unconscious and the city. In: Moving Images - Static Spaces: Architecture, Art, Media, Film, Digital Art and Design, Altinbas University, Istanbul, 12th - 13th April 2018. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Unhomely Street is a twenty-minute essay film that follows a female protagonist in a state of fugue following a head injury as she wanders an alienating city underbelly of clubs and free parties. Through recollections of anti-capitalist conversations, historical information about wartime atrocity, and human brutality, she searches for hope in an increasingly frightening, subjective landscape. The film was produced when the filmmaker was recovering from post-concussive syndrome following a head injury and in contrast to conventional filmmaking methods, it was constructed directly from intuitively made audio-visual sequences without a prior script or production plan. The film captures a subjective landscape that captures this specific form of mental illness but also explores a twenty-first century vision of the real city locations; Sheffield, the filmmaker's home, and Berlin, where she visited several times during the production. The featured locations in both cities explore the hidden sides. In Freudian terms these areas and activities could be said to constitute the city's unconscious. Outdoor 'free' parties feature, and sites of past raves where the graffiti stands for human resistance to mainstream culture. I propose that the film is screened in its entirety. My research areas are psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and art practice as research. I would like to present a short paper by way of introducing the film and exploring the issues raised in the project; the urban environment, its relation to mental illness, dance culture, and art practice and dance as a form of resistance. The paper would consider the Freudian topography of the psyche as a metaphor for the city, and the relation of art and dance to Deleuze's notion of the refrain.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Research Institute, Centre or Group - Does NOT include content added after October 2018: Cultural Communication and Computing Research Institute > Art and Design Research Centre
Departments - Does NOT include content added after October 2018: Faculty of Science, Technology and Arts > Department of Art and Design
Depositing User: Susannah Gent
Date Deposited: 16 May 2018 08:35
Last Modified: 18 Mar 2021 05:21
URI: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/20946

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