Unhomely Street: The unconscious and the city

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.