Movable Type; Under Erasure (2016)

Movable Type: Under Erasure is a 13-minute film with sound.

Filmed over a number of years the work was shot both in Alberta, Canada, and in my studio in Glasgow. Movable Type: Under Erasure features various forms of communication technology, cultural re-enactment sites, and a petroglyph of a car at ‘Writing-on Stone’ or Áísínai'pi, which in the language of the Blackfoot nation means “it is pictured” or “it is written". This specific petroglyph had been identified as ‘graffiti’ and attributed to European settlers until a photograph was discovered in 1998 and the provenance of the carving was confirmed.

The film’s title refers to both the ‘movable type’ of the printing press and to Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘sous rature’ which he developed (following Heidegger) in his book Of Grammatology (1967).

The monologue for the film was written, and voiced, by the theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who translated Of Grammatology into English in 1976.

The first screening of Movable Type: Under Erasure was at The Showroom, London.

An essay by the visual artist and writer Gary Zhexi Zhang was commissioned in response to the film and can be read here.