Walking Home Alone at Night (2015)
Perceptions of Fear and Risk amongst Women in Oslo
Clip from video installation, 18 minutes
MA Visual Sociology, Final Show 2015
Goldsmiths University of London
Walking Home Alone at Night is a sociological research project exploring the perceived risk of gendered bodies at night in Oslo. The project is a collection of interviews where themes and tendencies have been re-enacted by an actress. Re-enactment cinema was used as inspiration to develop a sociological methodology for re-creating embodied experiences. With a filmatic visual style based on Nordic Noir, a genre of crime fiction particularly concerned with the violation and enclosure of the female body, I wanted to describe a complex picture of a contemporary discourse on assault rape.
Using light, shadows and darkness as effect to show duality in character and location, I wanted to explore the difficulty of differentiating between fiction and reality when talking about risk perceptions. Through the installation I wish to communicate a phenomenological and embodied experiences of fear, where the meanings of the images and sounds put across to the audience are not only received as signs, but experienced in the body.
Race, racism, sexuality and homophobia became a big part of the final product, as the intersecting identities of gender, sexuality and race were a big part of my interview material. Navigating space is a more complex experience than the often only gendered representation. However, no one is "only gender", and therefore also discussing white experiences and whiteness, heterosexuality and disabled/abled experiences when navigating urban spaces, became crucial for my research. The video installation and written works (you can read some of it here) adds to the current debate on rape, an intersectional approach not ignoring the construct of assault rape to be heavily influenced by colonial interpretations of white women as victims, black or brown men as predators, and the mostly ignored experiences of black and brown women, who become trapped between gender and race, not fully being allowed to experience either category when walking alone at night.
The Cost of Living Cheaply (2014)
Group Exhibition, Goldsmiths University
The Cost of Living Cheaply was a research project exploring the time and labour put into the work of making a cheap and austere dinner for an upper middle-class family. The data considers time as a mean of labour production, and hence the invisible labour that goes into such work.
The sound map follows the woman as she travels through London in search of cheap pork from a local butcher, fresh vegetables from Borough market and suited red wine from Vinoteca to make a feast for herself and her partner.
The audience could sit down at the table with the served food and wine whilst looking at a map of where ingredients have been bought and listening to audio from that location, which includes discussions and talks between the woman and myself.
Social Mobility and Mobilities: Mapping the City (2013)
Presentation, Goldsmiths University
Mapping the City was an experimental research project exploring the possibilities and limitations of data collection. It is based on psychogeography and explores its history with subject/object relations and the flaneur in the city. A video of a bus is juxtaposed with counter seemingly counting the numbers of car, trees, people, etc. in the frame, while it is just a random selection of numbers, and explores objectivism as fleeing and not fixed. While in another video my personal, stream-of-consciousness like, observations are being written. Seemingly subjective observations such as “There is a sign that says “end” on the sidewalk. I think it means ‘end of construction area’. The experiment explores the mess in research and what researchers choose to leave or include "inside" and "outside" of the "frame".