SILVERTOWN (2018) | Short film
Silvertown is a hypnotic journey through the drastically changing landscapes of the London docklands. Inspired by a materialist approach, the camera intimately searches for meaning in the traces of materials and human history imprinted across the landscape and foregrounds their associative relations at a distance from the fixed analyses of the written word. Using the idea of a dock as a floating axis, the film embarks on a psycho-geographical exploration of both under and over-ground terrains. The dock was dug by the hands of migrant labourers, later it became the site of London city airport – exchanges of a vertical axis. As the old factories disappeared, and the towers grew, they were built once again by the same invisible force. The film's multiple reflections and intermittent disturbances challenge the pursuit of infinite growth and hint at the tales of migration, labour and rhetoric that have sustained it. What is progress? Suspended in between the atmospheric sounds of birdsong and construction, the only spoken words are those of workers and preachers.
Silvertown is an audio-visual collaboration between filmmaker Katya
Lachowicz and sound artist Clelia Patrono.
Headphones recommended.
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