Tendrils

Tendrils is an audiovisual spoken word allegory following a seaweed’s journey to personal liberation. This is the first project from the Royal College of Art’s Postgraduate Diploma program I recently completed. 

Drawing on my research on intersectional feminist queer theory from an anti-anthropocentric view, I imagine bodies otherwise through seaweed in the ocean. Inspired by Joan Jonas’s self-portraits amongst landscape that promote a deep ecological view, the seaweed becomes a metaphor for those who have felt oppression in relation to gender, sexuality and the body. 

Jack Halberstam’s Trans* Talk2 on how different the world can look from a change in perspective, as well as psychogeography, and biological research on seaweed is all formative to the development of this piece. 

The intent was to create a sensory, abstract film that held space between imagination and reality, like Laure Provost, and experimental in style like Chantal Akkerman that could be developed into an immersive, narrative installation. 

I wrote in an onomatopoeic, descriptive way about the natural environment like Robert MacFarlance, and then embodied it through spoken word like Maria Fusco’s brilliant rendition of the material granite in Master Rock. Driven by the activist nature of spoken word poet Kae Tempest and musical artist Self Esteem, I explored the use of my voice and language as material that could invite behavioural change. 

For sound and visuals, I recorded my voice, body, my partner’s body and daily elements around the household including ASMR soundbites. The abstraction of using these elements was my response to working with psychogeography for the first time; I roamed around my dwelling with a curious approach, trialling various visual and audio effects that could represent the underwater journey of a seaweed. These were documented on a Tascam Recorder DR-100 MKIII, a Sony A7III DSLR camera and edited in Adobe Premiere Pro.