The Elephant Trust

From the lush and green grass of the Kazakh Steppe to the glorifying architecture of its capital, from its giant open-air mines to the traces of invisible nuclear power, Kazakhstan is here captured in fragments. A fake observational film, but a genuine geographical and historical journey, through the remnants of the Soviet past and the contemporary capitalist ambitions of the country.

Trail of the Spider transposes Western genre motifs and the suppressed racial history of the American west (where one in three cowboys were black or Mexican) onto the transforming landscape of East London. Questioning and re-imagining the Western’s portrayal of the “Vanishing Frontier” , the film extends the metaphor to the material and psychological conditions of a present day city increasingly dominated by volatile financial speculations and private interests.

Habitat 2190 follows the construction of the nature reserve Fort Vert at the site of the so-called “Jungle”, the former refugee camp in Calais, France, addressing the ways in which an imagination of nature is weaponised in the governing of borders, interrogating the intersecting mobilities, rights and co-existence of human and nonhuman life. Commissioned for the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art as part of the exhibition Fragile Earth: seeds, weeds, plastic crust (29 June - 29 September 2019). Collaboration between Hanna Rullmann and Faiza Ahmad Khan, design by Tom Joyes. Supported by the Elephant Trust.

‘Wendy’ is a film response to the work of composer, electronic music innovator and polymath, Wendy Carlos. The work orbits a duet rehearsal for four hands on one piano. Together, Frances Scott and Chu-Li Shewring learn to play ‘Timesteps’, transcribed from the original score composed by Wendy Carlos, first imagined for Anthony Burgess’ book, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1962), and later realised for the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation.