Ewan: Room of Silence

[I enjoy the personal touches in your text. Why not work with the journal-essay form in which observations can be mixed in with readings and accounts of work you are making]

1. I am currently making two films. One for the GI festival in Glasgow, the other for the Eye museum. Both are historical enactments from archive material done within the context of an alternate reality.

2. Lotte orders my life, as does my health, parents, art, money, friends, dreams, fears and anxieties.

3 I’m working on a script for a feature length film in collaboration with a friend, about a dystopian political party. I am doing this by reworking archive material from and appropriating and subverting, by satirically reworking it until it undermines and interrogates the events and those depicted.This material ranges from a diverse selection of sources including books, interviews, speeches and current events. An example of this would be Tony Blair's address to Iraq after the coalition invasion in 2003, i have remade this into an ambiguous monologue with refrance to colonialism. Context is then removed so as to make the events universal and draw parallels from different events in the past. I am doing this because we live in a time of ideologically bankrupt spectacle.

4. I recently made the choice to change my film for the eye museum. I decided to do this because I am running out of time and consumed by stress. My eye is twitching, which seems a appropriate response in line with the name of the museum.

5. I recently began reading ‘The Establishment’ by Owen Jones. It is about the intersectional power structures of the British elite and how they serve one another. The police, politicians and media are all guilty of supporting free market capitalism imposed by predominantly American corporations to financially and politically benefit and serve a small 1% elite. neoliberal hegemony. Reading it is useful to me because I am interested in power structures, specifically between the media and political arena and military industrial complex. Owen outlines in a cohesive way how not just who you know and the elite circles you move through, such as oxbridge, but what you actually believe is what gives access and opportunities within British society. When I started reading it on the train, I saw him in the same carriage as me. I said nothing.

6. Paul Thomas Anderson is on my art radar, because I spent this morning reading his reddit interview with fans. He talked about his new film The Phantom Thread scored by Johnny Greenwood. His work tends to be about power hungry men who ruthlessly follow their dreams, and the alternate non-biological families they form. His style is marked by long takes, tracking shorts, utilising celluloid and combining Hollywood with art house sensibilities.

7. I do not watch TV. I read the Guardian because I am a leftist snowflake falling in the wind like a haiku ripped from a book of poetry. Current events inform every aspect of my practice, like porridge it provides my morning energy, and I like the taste.