From the film and live performance \f\XILE – A Body Between Shores
Single-channel film, 36min, 2025
Commissioned by Sirius Arts Centre
Developed through site-based work at Sirius Arts Centre and along the harbour edge at Spike Island, Cork
Featuring: Artem Trofimenko, Awen, Haru, Sophie Hutchinson
Live performance at Sirius Arts Centre, January 2026. Hi8 Video by Awen.
\f \— a taut body, a line, a ledge, a ladder. It is both structure and tension, a vessel through which presence moves, tracing a temporal and physical axis.
X — a mark, a crossing, a coordinate, an unknown. It signals fracture. It holds the possibility of rupture, of movement between stasis and collapse, of memory pressed into form.
–ile — a suffix suggesting tendency toward, a movement rather than a state: fragile, flexile, fractile. In \f\XILE, it evokes a body or structure leaning into uncertainty, a line drawn between points. Before tremor. Before release. The ladder, the vaults, the intervals between film and thud: here –ile becomes an inclination, a crossing held in suspense, registering the impermanent echoes of stone and spine.
A line is walked along a railing, suspended between Sirius and Spike, two poles of gravity. Verticality stretches the body taut, a seam stitched across, a pulsating thread of static binding the sites.
This line traces the weight of absence. As Said writes, exile is both wound and vantage, producing double vision: uprooted and seeing from many sides. This tension surfaces through the fragility of expired Soviet film and through the body itself:
the body is a vessel of memory. but also its rupture. a liquid archive spilling forward and back
[Benjamin’s angel of history faces the past, swept by the storm of progress, yet here it bears Khlebnikov’s broken tongue, a bird learning to stammer toward flight.]
[Cixous cast Icarus as in-heritance: attempting to write what it has received, flight etched in flesh, a descent began of his father and vanished at sea. For Marechera, exile unhomes the mind] “If you are a writer, exile is in your head.”
What could not speak ignites in the body: a flash of memory sears the flesh, memory that resists articulation insists on form.
The work has been created under the mentorship of Miguel Amado, initially in the context of Sample-Studios’s Studios of Sanctuary scheme, and subsequently with support from SIRIUS.
At Lavit Gallery, \f\XILE unfolds across two vaults, each offering a distinct encounter with temporal and corporeal presence. In the first, a long-form film commissioned by Sirius Arts Centre, an essay in image and sound tracing the imprint of place. In the second vault, a driftwood ladder is activated by a feedback system, sending tremors through its body that sound the stone chamber. The architecture itself resonates under tension, folding image, sound, and material into a living, responsive environment.