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Access: There are two versions of the film available to watch as part of this screening. The first contains Open Captioning, the second contains both Open Captioning and Audio Description/Descriptive Audio.
Price Transparency: To cover the $0.99 USD fee that this streaming platform charges us for each time the film is unlocked by a viewer, the lowest ticket cost ("Scholarship") is $0.99 USD + transaction fee. However, if this price is a barrier, please email restfestfilmfestival@gmail.com for a voucher. No one will be turned away due to lack of funds. Funds received through the two higher price tiers will go toward covering other administrative costs and compensating the artist & organizers for their labor.
A mixed media, moving-image (love) letter to others with energy-limiting conditions. Using 16mm direct animation, archival & new footage, poetic voiceover, and an ethereal soundscape, artist Sop immerses the viewer into the both isolating and unifying experience of a chronic illness flare during a hot summer indoors.
Synopsis:
‘We Year’ portrays a narrowed and claustrophobic view of a hot summer indoors whilst experiencing an ME/CFS relapse. Houseplants die from a lack of care, insomnia thrives, there are battles with medication and stinky t-shirts, and the domineering presence of a wearable overarches all. A 16mm direct animation translation of this wearable’s ‘energy bars’ acts as a running measure of ‘crip-time’; Hi8 footage from the artist's archive of the outdoors sits next to digital footage of their immediate inside-the-house world; and a narrative - at times claustrophobic, ritualistic, or joyfully expansive - meet to describe the knotty, non-linear, chronically ill experience, with the curtailments that they must endure. Meant as a (love) letter to other people with energy limiting conditions, the artist ends with a message of solidarity: that we do not walk this path alone, even if we often are alone.
About the Artist:
Sop (they/them/theirs) is a torn and crooked leaf, a root embedded in the dirt, a shoot reaching to the sky. An artist working in crip time with words, sound and moving image.
They work primarily with nature which they use as a portal to interrogate their own experience of existing in a chronically ill body, and how other disabled and chronically ill bodies interact with and relate to nature and the natural world. Their work tends to centre modes of sociality, beginning with personal narrative, then expanding through dialogue with their crip community to include other bodies’ concerns.
They are currently working towards a book about grief, gender, chronic illness and ghosts, and a moving image work about crip sex and volcanos.
They have shown work at Wellcome Collection, British Museum, ICA, Cubitt, LUX, and Whitechapel Gallery; and their work is included in publications ‘Documents of Contemporary Art: Walking’. Ed. Tom Jeffreys; ‘Botanical Architecture: Plants, Buildings and Us’, by Paul Dobraszczyk and ‘Bodies of Sound’. Eds. Irene Revell and Sarah Shin.
They are anti-clock, pro-informal-networks-of-care; anti-normality/standardisation; pro-interpersonal-dedication.
They live and work in South East London.
Access: There are two versions of the film available to watch as part of this screening. The first contains Open Captioning, the second contains both Open Captioning and Audio Description/Descriptive Audio.
Price Transparency: To cover the $0.99 USD fee that this streaming platform charges us for each time the film is unlocked by a viewer, the lowest ticket cost ("Scholarship") is $0.99 USD + transaction fee. However, if this price is a barrier, please email restfestfilmfestival@gmail.com for a voucher. No one will be turned away due to lack of funds. Funds received through the two higher price tiers will go toward covering other administrative costs and compensating the artist & organizers for their labor.
A mixed media, moving-image (love) letter to others with energy-limiting conditions. Using 16mm direct animation, archival & new footage, poetic voiceover, and an ethereal soundscape, artist Sop immerses the viewer into the both isolating and unifying experience of a chronic illness flare during a hot summer indoors.
Synopsis:
‘We Year’ portrays a narrowed and claustrophobic view of a hot summer indoors whilst experiencing an ME/CFS relapse. Houseplants die from a lack of care, insomnia thrives, there are battles with medication and stinky t-shirts, and the domineering presence of a wearable overarches all. A 16mm direct animation translation of this wearable’s ‘energy bars’ acts as a running measure of ‘crip-time’; Hi8 footage from the artist's archive of the outdoors sits next to digital footage of their immediate inside-the-house world; and a narrative - at times claustrophobic, ritualistic, or joyfully expansive - meet to describe the knotty, non-linear, chronically ill experience, with the curtailments that they must endure. Meant as a (love) letter to other people with energy limiting conditions, the artist ends with a message of solidarity: that we do not walk this path alone, even if we often are alone.
About the Artist:
Sop (they/them/theirs) is a torn and crooked leaf, a root embedded in the dirt, a shoot reaching to the sky. An artist working in crip time with words, sound and moving image.
They work primarily with nature which they use as a portal to interrogate their own experience of existing in a chronically ill body, and how other disabled and chronically ill bodies interact with and relate to nature and the natural world. Their work tends to centre modes of sociality, beginning with personal narrative, then expanding through dialogue with their crip community to include other bodies’ concerns.
They are currently working towards a book about grief, gender, chronic illness and ghosts, and a moving image work about crip sex and volcanos.
They have shown work at Wellcome Collection, British Museum, ICA, Cubitt, LUX, and Whitechapel Gallery; and their work is included in publications ‘Documents of Contemporary Art: Walking’. Ed. Tom Jeffreys; ‘Botanical Architecture: Plants, Buildings and Us’, by Paul Dobraszczyk and ‘Bodies of Sound’. Eds. Irene Revell and Sarah Shin.
They are anti-clock, pro-informal-networks-of-care; anti-normality/standardisation; pro-interpersonal-dedication.
They live and work in South East London.