ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author investigates the production of his Against video for which he drews on a personal photographic archive, the Translucence musical score and Derek Jarman’s writing to create a staged performance to camera. His interdisciplinary arts practice is concerned with the interpretative transformation of source material, in particular, literary texts into an elusive form of self-portraiture, creating still and moving image works that explore memory, place and familial relationships. Accordingly, the opening sequence begins with the author body obscuring the view – the heavy blackness operating as a visual barrier to memory, yet as Jarman describes in Chroma, ‘black is boundless, the imagination races in the dark’. By allowing himself to respond emotionally and selectively to a range of photographic, sound and textual source materials, adaptation acted as an appropriate, active method for the recollection and re-staging of memory.
