Absence She Said

‘Concentrated on the place of a female character in urban landscapes and domestic interiors, Absence, She Said is a highly atmospheric meditation on stasis and movement, on isolation and belonging. Without dialogue or soliloquy, the sound employs excerpts from Shostakovich String Quartet and a kind of musique concrete to enhance mood and rhythm. Structurally, the scenes in the tape alternate between the interior space of a flat – with all the attendant suggestion of the reassuring familiarity of domestic space being simultaneously represented and questioned in the frozen, blurred quality of the still images at the beginning of the tape – and the exterior urban landscapes, interspersed by short, poetic inter titles evoking the subjective states of the female character. It is this character who, through her heightened presence at the beginning and the end of the tape, frames events and images, suggesting that they are at once visions, memories and facts, subjective and objective images simultaneously.’ – Chris Darke