FILM ACTS

Radical Ventriloquism: Acts of Speaking for & Speaking Through
Guest Curator: Lee Campbell
18.04.20 at 15.00 and 16.30

Film Acts was the final event forming part of Radical Ventriloquism: Acts of Speaking for and Speaking Through. The event consisted of a series of screenings with artists/filmmakers with contributions by Lee Campbell, Beagles and Ramsay, Common Culture and Jake Shannon.

Due to the COVID 19 Pandemic the event migrated online with screenings taking place at 15.00 and 16.30.

Beagles and Ramsay
Trilogy, 2000
Digital Video
3:00mins

Beagles and Ramsay
New Meat, 2004
Digital Video
4:45mins

Having used various grotesque duplicates of themselves in earlier work to explore the tragic aspects of daily life, New Meat satirises conventions around the manufacture of novelty; both within the broader realms of consumerism and the niche spheres of the artworld.


Lee Campbell
HOW CAN I GET MY PARTNER BE MY FINGER?, 2019
Digital Video
6:26mins

Disrupting the boundary between the active and the passive of who is in control and who is being a puppet, conversations ripe with absurdist comedy take place between a couple - one present, one technologically distant - my partner Alex and I. Alex ‘speaks through’ my finger via a tape-recording. Sometimes I ‘speak for’ Alex. The big question is: is it Alex speaking or is it me speaking? Or, in a psychoanalytic sense, is it our ‘strangers within’ who are speaking?


Lee Campbell
TACKLE, 2020
Digital Video
15:53mins

Lee’s recent film TACKLE confronts some of the issues and problems that men are under at the moment in society in terms of male identity. Like a balloon about to pop. TACKLE was made with vintage footage of a 1996/1997 football match between Coventry City and Aston Villa from YouTube, sound and moving image recordings made on a Sony Ericsson Cybershoot K800i mobile phone between 2005-2006, drawings and paintings made between 2005-2007 and 2018–2020 and photographic stills and moving image recordings made between 2011-2020 on various iPhones.  Lee will perform a live version of this film throughout Radical Ventriloquism combining the film recording and live performance involving a disembodied finger.


Common Culture
The New El Dorado, 2010
HD Video
21:49minsCommissioned by: Manifesta Foundation, for Manifesta 8
Film crew: Carlos García Vázquez - Camara operator, Nuria Muñoz Ortín – Director of Photography, Ángel Jonatan Díaz Andrada – Sound, Manuel Abrisqueta Martínez – Edition
Actors: Miguel Ángel Cárceles, Fran Bermejo, Fran Latorre, Mark Christopher Scherbaum
Extras: José Ramón de Moya, María Martínez, Elena Guillamón, Susan Carrero, Berta Garrido, Hanna Conroy, Yolanda Riquelme
Make-up artist: Ángela Doval
Translation: Susan Carrero, Esmeralda Bernabé

Exploring the phenomena of cultural consumption and tourism, the work narrates an encounter between the specific characteristics of a place and the culture of others. The work responds to the power relations at work in the instrumentalisation of art evident in art biennials. 

Jake Shannon
Sammy The Salmon, 2018
Digital video, Shot on RED 16x9 (1 : 2.39)
6:30mins
Writer and Director: Jake Shannon
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Actors: Liam Maguire, Mark Mitchell, Elizabeth Esguerra

The puppetry of Sammy, while obviously aimed to be comedic, also has a more metaphorical purpose. Sammy represents the repressed voice that lies within Spencer. Sammy, reassures Spencer that he can speak on behalf of him, which Spencer finds convenience in, but in actual fact, Spencer needs to gain his own individual voice. In Spencer's moment of crisis when it comes for him to finally speak for himself, and to connect with his own identity, in a form of catharsis Sammy is not only killed, but consumed.