An expressive picture of the city’s in-between areas, within which it is possible to extract oneself from ruthless metropolitan despair, suspended in transit from one time and location to another, in a procedure of psychological and spiritual change.
In one of the opening scenes of The Sun Has No Shadow a regulated voice pricesquote art critic and media theorist Boris Groys, recommending that: “the openness to exteriority and its affects is an important particular of another function of the modernist inheritance and that is to expose the Other within oneself, to endedupbeing Other.” Under the look of speculative filmmaker and video artist Rebecca Salvadori, reconditioned factories and storagefacilities, commercial parks, dimly-lit underpasses and motorway-adjacent forests are produced not just as hedonistic areas, the as yet undeveloped genuine estate upon which London’s clubs and complimentary celebrations can discover an all too frequently short-term house, however as liminal websites of transformative prospective, in which one is suspended in shortlived minutes of intimacy and common connection. Cutting inbetween non-linear documentary and abstract montage in a dissociative assemblage of image, noise and text, The Sun Has No Shadow browses a crucial shared area inbetween the moving image and live noise and efficiency, splicing video from Canning Town organization FOLD and its cherished Sunday day rave UNFOLD next to reviews from happy ravers and Salvadori’s own buddies. “I have constantly been drawn towards environments and circumstances that felt transitional, open, not totally completed,” describes Salvadori. “I think it may be since these contexts permit you to exist in a less mechanical method. They are more layered and have a area of possibility within them. When an location hasactually been developed for a particular require, whatever feels more compressed and mechanical. The edges of a city are areas in-between, locations where the intentionality of urbanisation endsupbeing transitional and nearly left to itself.”
In this method FOLD, setdown on the edge of an E16 commercial estate, takes on the wild aura of the “edgelands,” seperate from the relentlessness of the city and tinged with the short-term energy of wilderness, charged with transformative prospective. In the excerpt of Salvadori’s movie provided above, the filmmaker’s passage through these liminal environments serves as both a record of browsing the intricacy of London’s external reaches and a prescient medicaldiagnosis of a modern condition. Flashes of hi-vis pants lightup the ghosts of the 2nd summerseason of love haunting Salvadori’s frame, mapping the range inbetween London’s rave scenes past and present. Loops of night vision videofootage of Salvadori’s pals at an after celebration repeat as an hidden speaker tells the experience of seeing themselves on screen, the visual repeatings taking on the continuous rhythm of a 4 on the flooring beat. These vignettes, displaced type discernable area and time, appear to battle with the psychic problem provided by the business and business strengths of metropolitan life, parsing the stress inbetween a desire for and an presumed requirement of numerous kinds of dissociation, be they psychological, political or narcotic. These liminal areas present an chance for escape from the city, however whether this is an escape from an frustrating network of automation and commodification or an escape into a DIY development of neighborhood is left deliberately unclear by the filmmaker, an inscrutability stressed by facial blur, voice modulation and separated subtitles. “Sometime ago I got a message from somebody I wear’t understand,” Salvadori remembers. They stated: In your work whatever occurs in its precise own time, I felt I was not enjoying a video, simply being in myself, part of a constant life of something. It was a actually odd sensation.”
Salvadori continues: “Just like it may occur in extremely loud and crowded environments, connections are started, disrupted, lost and remade; one stumbles throughout discussions just to desert them onceagain.” Her deft cuts inbetween the exoskeleton of FOLD, commercial fan and red LED light framed versus the cold grey of an early London earlymorning, and fly-on-the-wall paperwork of the club’s residents stimulate the beautiful disorientation of the club area, recording a really specific sort of sensory overload. Soundtracked with distorted fields recordings of the club in complete swing, this montage is inscribed with the disembodied words of an unidentified raver. Enveloped in a blown out recording of machinic techno churn, the cacophony of image, noise and text estimates the experience of overhearing something gorgeous from a completestranger dancing next to you, increasing above the smoke and the din for an immediate. “The subtitles, frequently sharing individual ideas, expressions cut out of the context or uncomplicated declarations, include into this continuously progressing layered intricacy that I discover remarkable, this undefined stream of something,” states Salvadori. “Facial blur and voice modulation are options born from a mix of both the club personalprivacy policies and a response to my mindset towards depicting close pals. With the The Sun Has No Shadow, I felt the requirement to separate; for the veryfirst time those represented are not totally themselves, my pals, however more automobiles for a particular symbolic minute.”
This dissociation into importance manifests actually in the excerpt’s climax, where the haze and blur of the crowd liquifies into the abstract rupture of what Salvadori terms ‘euroemptiness,’ an developing graphic language madeup of moving mixes of animated shapes and colours. “When I began shooting I didn’t have any sense of borders; myself, the electroniccamera and what was being shot felt similarly essential, to the point where I discovered myself vanishing behind the cam,” describes Salvadori. “I had to stop and overturn the trajectory flux: rather of recording whatever I saw, I separated and began making abstract animations. The easy animated geometries have constantly represented my desire for silence and vacuum. Then years after my veryfirst experiments, ‘euroemptiness’ hasactually grown into a portal for brand-new dogmatic messages. I