Featuring artist Andrew Black discussing his 2017 film, Submerged Village. The film uses the imagery of Pamela Coleman Smith’s version of the Moon Card from the Tarot deck as a reference point for generic landscapes that linked to Andrew’s research into friendships, community and thinking about what it means to build a home in a place from a queer, embodied position. We unpick the meanings and symbols on the Moon Card and discuss the ways these are portrayed within the film. We also talk about how the filmmaking process is suggestive of a Tarot reading in the sense that it explores a multitude of voices, storytelling, meanings and experiences that create moments that are simultaneously uncanny and related to everyday life experience.
AB: Andrew Black
KK: Khadea Kuchenmeister
LT: Laura Tully
LT:Maybe we can begin by chatting a bit about how the project for Submerged Village came about.
AB:So that came out of the Market Gallery’s Studio Projects residency, which I did in 2017. I was on the Transmission Committee and I took a month off to just focus on that residency. The film is just made up of material that I gathered during that time. At first that was quite a hodgepodge of different stuff that didn’t really match up and when making the film over those few months it was just a process of tying some of these things together. I guess, loosely around that time, I’d been thinking about friendships and community and home; so places, but having a home in a place. I was brought up in Yorkshire and I now live in Scotland. The film kind of ping pongs between those two places and looks at the generic landscapes of those two places. I engage with the feelings of harmony and disharmony in those two places, Yorkshire and Scotland, from a queer embodied position.
LT:The film Submerged Village uses elements from the imagery on the Pamela Coleman Smith version of the tarot deck from the moon card. I thought we could talk about why you felt kind of drawn to the card and the different symbols that appear on it. I also like in the film, how you come up with a really wide range of definitions of what the moon card represents as well. So maybe we can start by talking about the moon symbol itself and how it doesn’t really appear in the film, but it’s more referenced through puns.
AB:The whole film is structured in a way that is loosely like a tarot reading, not explicitly, but the idea that each tarot card has quite a complex scene within it, then you build up the relations between all of these different images. The film puts charged scenes together and against each other. There are also several voices that you have to try to unpick and even complicate what’s going on. The way that I learned to do tarot was with people weighing in on what they thought was going on and not really referring to too much literature about it, but just talking about it. So that is why there are a lot of different voices in the film. All of the speakers are my friends and all of them are reading different kinds of texts and all of the texts that are about tarot, specifically the moon card. I literally just dragged the texts off the internet. They’re not interpretations of the card that I agree with or even find interesting.
That’s kind of how the film was made. It was whatever was the first point of contact with that content, that I just took. It then went into the work like that to put a bit of distance between my own feelings and whatever was going on to keep it fairly ambiguous as to what interpretation to happen.
A lot of the phrasing and the terminology of the texts about the moon card are quite clunky and clumsy. That was another thing that I was just trying to incorporate all of the awkwardness, mistakes, fumbling — all of this stuff into the film to make it a sort of juddering, like a narrow journey or something, it’s not smooth.
The incorporation of the moon card itself and the symbols took quite a lot of care. I tried to feel through the card, to try and tease out all of the individual symbols into concrete things that relate directly to my experiences in those places that the film is about.
So in the moon card, the drawing by Pamela Coleman Smith, you’ve got that sort of crayfish at the bottom centre crawling out of a pool and there’s a path that leads up into mountains, between two dogs; one of them is a wild dog and one of them’s a tame dog. There are also two watchtowers looking back on the path and then above it all. There is also this quite emotionally troubled looking moon face shining peels of light down onto the whole scene. When I went back to Yorkshire, I looked at places I went to when I was a kid. I used to go in the river and find these British species of crayfish, which is now a threatened species because of this invasive American species called the signal crayfish. I went back there to try and see if I could find any of these indigenous crayfish and I did manage to find them, but the range is reduced by a lot now. The text about the crayfish comes from a fishing forum and it’s just this extremely conservative, kind of stern, mediating voice that tells you how you should feel about this ecological process that’s been catalysed by people, that’s now happening of this other species, and succeeding. The “native species” has a lot of parallels with wider political sentiments I feel about indigenousness or nativeness in these landscapes, in these places like they’re two sides of the same coin. You have people who have opinions about what should be in that place and how it should look and the order that it should be in and I just want to disrupt that a bit. The dogs appear as well in the anecdote that Adam [Benmakhlouf] tells us about visiting my friend who lives on a queer land project outside of Glasgow. With this anecdote where their two dogs went crazy and then obviously the landscape and texture of the landscape itself is inherent throughout.
LT:I was just going to say that the dogs are quite interesting because there’s lots of interpretations that one is like a dog and the other one’s a wolf.
AB:Yeah.
LT:Which is quite similar to this idea of a dog being kind of like man’s best friends, so to speak. Then the wolf is, I guess in a lot of Western kind of fables, the deceitful and dangerous person or figure, which is quite interesting.
AB:There’s a lot of like stuff in this tarot deck about binaries or dualities. So you have the two dogs, like the wild one and the tame one. Order and chaos, whatever you want to call that. Then there are a lot of coded masculine and feminine presences throughout the rest of the deck and I think that’s something that I’ve spoken about before. I thought about this quite a lot and was trying to work with those received ideas, quite solid ideas, of two simple opposing things and then a grey area in-between. That’s literally what is happening in the moon card actually, as you have a path leading between two; a wild dog or a wolf and a tame dog, and the two towers that oppose each other. I think that’s something that in trying to re-read, we read those received narratives as queer people. You sort of still have to acknowledge that those are realities or are taken as realities for a lot of people and you’re still working between those two objects between quite rigid ideas or something.
LT:Yeah. This sort of binary between night and day. When I was looking through the deck, the moon appears in three cards; but it’s always in a day, not a night sky because there are tarot cards that have night skies and darkness, but none of them contain the moon. It’s quite interesting how the moon is uncannily appearing in these light day skies as opposed to night.
AB:That’s something that I like about the tarot is that these little symbols occur throughout. It’s not necessarily just part of the scene setting or something on the moon. It’s not meant to tell you that it’s night time. It’s meant to tell you that there’s like a feeling of unease, or like a direct connection to an emotional undercurrent or something, which is totally what the moon card is about. When the moon appears in a different card, it’s like I need to listen to this. The high, the high priestess is one isn’t it? Where that’s completely about listening to an unconscious or subconscious intuition. That the moon’s journey, as the subconscious or emotional journey. The decision to use the moon cards more prominently than other tarot cards in this video is to state things as out of proportion. The reflected light where it creates an uneasy kind of light on everything, nothing’s particularly clear. Then this kind of nightmarish but not scary. Everything’s grotesque or everything’s distorted somehow. It creates this feeling that is like a very queer state of being specifically when you think about being queer in response or in relation to a place and all of it’s inherited or, inscribed narratives that it carries with it when you were over there. So that was something I was interested in as well.
KK:You get that feeling from watching the film, an uneasy feeling of stories being told and then you’re not really sure where these moments are going. I guess that that was something that was interesting and we were thinking about the voices and, creating moments of confusing and these uneasy and uncanny things that can describe queer oral histories ,or was it queer bodies that you were saying?
AB:Well, both. There’s obviously a bit of a focus on how a body feels in place, because there’s all of this footage of getting into the very cold water and being in the water. It’s definitely from a bodily position. I was trying to detach from any sort of directly verifiable or understandable experience and just tell anecdotes or stories that aren’t from their own position. It’s not clear who’s telling what story and it’s not clear how they’re building off of that. There’s no momentum. It’s just things happening. Adam narrates the story about the dogs while something completely different is happening on the screen. You have to follow the two of them together, although they’re similar, I guess if you didn’t know, you would make an association that Adam was narrating what was being shown to you. I just wanted to detach everything like that from it’s kind of source and just have things happening at the same time, but not harmoniously.
LT:I think it was interesting when you spoke before about the landscapes on the tarot being reminiscent of Scottish landscapes, which I’d never really thought of before but since you said it keep looking through them and seeing that as well.
AB:For me they are reminiscent of those landscapes especially the ones that are of the coast or seaside. There is never just a flat expansive ocean, it always shows islands out there and that has a sort of archipelago West coast kind of feeling. It’s a really specific landscape I think and it’s always reminded me of that.
LT:The archive footage of the ruins at West End for me, when I looked at it, the landscape almost felt a bit like the moon on earth. Are you trying to find something reminiscent of the moon on earth? It’d be interesting as obviously the West End is a submerged village, that’s now a reservoir and you can only see bits of it. When I was reading about it online, when it had some periods of drought the village ruins start to appear and it’s a kind of touristy thing. I think maybe you can tell us a bit more about it.
AB:Firstly, the moon doesn’t appear explicitly in the film. I feel like I should say this because this conversation makes it sound quite a complex and serious, but actually it’s a very, very stupid film. I watched it again the other day and it is actually incredibly stupid and quite puerile. There’s quite a lot of like pants dropping and mooning going on in it! Which was another very bad pun or something? I never really thought about just like filming the moon it wasn’t specifically just about that. It was more about the moon tarot and the feelings and the associations and its symbolism. It has bums, lots of bums which is always nice to see!
[Collective laughter]
The second point you made about the West End the footage of the reservoir is just ripped off YouTube. Again, nearly all of the actual content of this film is just like ripped or very simply taken. Um, it’s not really heavily researched. Thruscross Reservoir is close to where I grew up and it’s somewhere that I’ve known through my whole life as having a village underneath it which is very spooky and very otherworldly. There’ve been a couple of famous droughts within my lifetime where it’s been visible; I’ve never actually really seen it. Although if you walk along the top of the reservoir, there’s an old mill building that is half in the water. I found amazing footage of this guy narrating himself; he’d been involved in the actual construction of the reservoir, the dam. He is narrating and going round it again and looking back at the buildings. He has this incredibly familiar voice for me, which has this dry and level and completely unironic voice that is just hilarious to listen to. I think it just says a lot about the mentality of that place. For me, it just speaks volumes and the way that he narrates his journey around this reservoir, and he’s having this little nostalgia trip. The footage is in this degraded VHS or something. He also nearly gets stuck in the mud and says that he nearly dies and he’s screaming for help. I can’t kind of imagine doing that, but that’s fine. It was just this, absolute gold for me is that I couldn’t leave that out.
I’m regretting it a bit now though, because there’s actually a lot more in the landscape of Thruscross and the Washburn Valley that is very interesting. I was going to be making a project about it for Glasgow International this year (2020) until it was obviously cancelled or delayed. I’m kind of regretting giving it such a part of this film now because I feel like it would have been excellent to just draw into that material a bit more. The whole thing about the submerged village under the reservoir, I guess I liked the association villaging centres. And especially then thinking about like a gay village or something like a really, again, really stupid way. But thinking back about the community and the way that queer community exists in art, it exists just slightly under the surface and we have the same reference points as everybody else, but it’s sort of, you use them or read them in a different way. You have a different understanding of the same things or something like that.
I also love this kind of slightly fantasy-ish association of an underwater village. And that’s thinking about the tarot again and thinking about how you sort of engage with these scenes and the scenery landscapes in this tension. For example, the way that the guy who’s narrating that video [about West End] and the guy on the fishing forum are presenting their interaction with this landscape, is factual and I know that these bodies govern this space. I know that it was built by these people. I know that this species is meant to be here and this species is not. And then there’s kind of like feeling your way through it and not really listening to those kinds of lines or boundaries but just actually like feeling in a very sensory way through this space; it requires a little bit of fantasy — a little bit fantasising.
KK:You really get that feeling from it. The voice sounds so objective and so very authoritarian and very direct. But then the other authors or voices kind of have this more imaginative kind of feel.
AB:There’s something about that voice which is just at least very didactic, like he wants you to know what it knows about this place and you are meant to learn from it and that forbids you — or puts some barrier up for you having your own relationship with it. It tells you the terms in which you’re meant to relate to that landscape. And that was absolutely, on my mind throughout and has been while making this kind of this body of work where Submerged Village I guess, was the first. I included the ‘Yes’ badge [from the Scottish Independence referendum campaign]. The Scottish collective imagination relies on these landscapes, this very majestic kind of landscape and in a way that I am kind of very much seduced by them. Landscapes kind of contribute to these political ideas about belonging. The film was made three years after the Independence Referendum but that was still really on my mind, like really, really on my mind, a lot during that time. Thinking about if there is going to be Independence or what do we want to achieve? Who has ownership over this land? As an English person who’s lived in Scotland for all of my adult life and who voted for Independence and really had a lot of energy for that, I guess. Maybe it felt important and still feels important for queer people in the UK to be making work about place and how we have a voice in a place. Just unpicking those kinds of received voices that purport to speak for these landscapes.
LT:You travel in the film to this bothy and you have this book full of writing and it almost feels like you’ve created all this kind of content, or you’ve been writing together, or you’ve been doing something in some sort of collaborative way when actually it’s almost elements that have been pulled from something else.
AB:The book in the bothy is the guest book that we found there when we went there. They usually have like a comment book and it was just funny what people had written in this book. It revealed a lot about how people feel entitled to speak when they are several miles away from a paved road. Like primal opinions that they may have show themselves. One thing that stuck out to me was that somebody had written, ‘I identify as a toaster.’ This phrase is emblematic of the kind of kick back on the internet from sad people who are like really not all right with people being able to talk about their gender in expanded ways. It’s just like a cliche, a joke — ‘you can identify as anything you want now’. You know that you can marry a dog now if you want, this kind of like stupid, really conservative, but also really, really basic criticism of queer conversations that are now fringing onto the mainstream. And somebody had written that in this book and it was just like, wow! This reveals that this is now in the psyche of people in this country; like really deeply. It was quite… strange to see that there.
And then the other thing that was there was this absolute screaming rant written in very angry capitals about these kayakers who were probably English and all of this. And it’s just, how angry can you get? How entitled do you feel to this land? Like it’s not yours any more than it is anybody else’s, it’s actually owned by a private estate. So maybe that’s the thing that you should be getting angry about, not that it’s being used by English kayakers. So many people are battling each other for this land. People feel like they have a really emotional ownership of it. It’s like “I’m this like… rugged kind of Scottish outdoorsman and when I see English people doing outdoor pursuits here, it devalues that and makes me feel less legitimate,” or something. In the same way it is like a very emotional place, that bothy, because it’s a ruined village, which was depopulated (I assume during the clearances or maybe afterwards) so there’s this history of violence there. At present it’s used as a pretty location for outdoor sports or something, which sits very uncomfortably with that history. You can say that for a lot of that coastline; but these two things are just like so charged in this little notebook that people have left their comments in.
LT:When you say it like that the comments book is no different from the comments section of an Instagram post or something. It shows people’s entitlement and also like this anonymity, like when you’re not having to be accountable for your words.
AB:I just wanted to take care to only sort of include that as something that me and the people that are in the film sort of like… not respond to but I wanted to take care to just put us in that landscape, not in a sort of like occupying way, but just to show that we are there as well. I guess like suggestion in the film that some kind of gay sex has just happened in the bothy or whatever. This also exists in this space, you know, like it’s not just owned by the big birthday bash groups and the hill walkers and the kayakers.
The whole thing started from thinking about friendships and home. Specifically building a home in some way, but not in a really, concrete or finished way. And not in a physical way, particularly, but just thinking about how you relate to the place that you live and the way that you sort of build it for each other. And the way that you imagine something together.
Anyway, I wasn’t trying to lay any claim to this land in any way. I think about fantasy a lot and about how fantasies are like a desire for an unattainable object. It’s never realised, or if it is, it’s never the same as it was in the fantasy. It’s like following a path of desire or something, you could be in these places in emotionally and erotically charged ways and build this little closed space, which is the film itself. So within the space of this film you have a landscape that is populated by people that I know but also like Justin Bieber, because there are Justin Bieber nude photos in it as well of him like swimming in this waterfall in Hawaii or something! These different sorts of presences are all kind of like contributing to one sort of fantasised space.
Featuring artist Andrew Black discussing his 2017 film, Submerged Village. The film uses the imagery of Pamela Coleman Smith’s version of the Moon Card from the Tarot deck as a reference point for generic landscapes that linked to Andrew’s research into friendships, community and thinking about what it means to build a home in a place from a queer, embodied position. We unpick the meanings and symbols on the Moon Card and discuss the ways these are portrayed within the film. We also talk about how the filmmaking process is suggestive of a Tarot reading in the sense that it explores a multitude of voices, storytelling, meanings and experiences that create moments that are simultaneously uncanny and related to everyday life experience.
AB: Andrew Black
KK: Khadea Kuchenmeister
LT: Laura Tully
LT:Maybe we can begin by chatting a bit about how the project for Submerged Village came about.
AB:So that came out of the Market Gallery’s Studio Projects residency, which I did in 2017. I was on the Transmission Committee and I took a month off to just focus on that residency. The film is just made up of material that I gathered during that time. At first that was quite a hodgepodge of different stuff that didn’t really match up and when making the film over those few months it was just a process of tying some of these things together. I guess, loosely around that time, I’d been thinking about friendships and community and home; so places, but having a home in a place. I was brought up in Yorkshire and I now live in Scotland. The film kind of ping pongs between those two places and looks at the generic landscapes of those two places. I engage with the feelings of harmony and disharmony in those two places, Yorkshire and Scotland, from a queer embodied position.
LT:The film Submerged Village uses elements from the imagery on the Pamela Coleman Smith version of the tarot deck from the moon card. I thought we could talk about why you felt kind of drawn to the card and the different symbols that appear on it. I also like in the film, how you come up with a really wide range of definitions of what the moon card represents as well. So maybe we can start by talking about the moon symbol itself and how it doesn’t really appear in the film, but it’s more referenced through puns.
AB:The whole film is structured in a way that is loosely like a tarot reading, not explicitly, but the idea that each tarot card has quite a complex scene within it, then you build up the relations between all of these different images. The film puts charged scenes together and against each other. There are also several voices that you have to try to unpick and even complicate what’s going on. The way that I learned to do tarot was with people weighing in on what they thought was going on and not really referring to too much literature about it, but just talking about it. So that is why there are a lot of different voices in the film. All of the speakers are my friends and all of them are reading different kinds of texts and all of the texts that are about tarot, specifically the moon card. I literally just dragged the texts off the internet. They’re not interpretations of the card that I agree with or even find interesting.
That’s kind of how the film was made. It was whatever was the first point of contact with that content, that I just took. It then went into the work like that to put a bit of distance between my own feelings and whatever was going on to keep it fairly ambiguous as to what interpretation to happen.
A lot of the phrasing and the terminology of the texts about the moon card are quite clunky and clumsy. That was another thing that I was just trying to incorporate all of the awkwardness, mistakes, fumbling — all of this stuff into the film to make it a sort of juddering, like a narrow journey or something, it’s not smooth.
The incorporation of the moon card itself and the symbols took quite a lot of care. I tried to feel through the card, to try and tease out all of the individual symbols into concrete things that relate directly to my experiences in those places that the film is about.
So in the moon card, the drawing by Pamela Coleman Smith, you’ve got that sort of crayfish at the bottom centre crawling out of a pool and there’s a path that leads up into mountains, between two dogs; one of them is a wild dog and one of them’s a tame dog. There are also two watchtowers looking back on the path and then above it all. There is also this quite emotionally troubled looking moon face shining peels of light down onto the whole scene. When I went back to Yorkshire, I looked at places I went to when I was a kid. I used to go in the river and find these British species of crayfish, which is now a threatened species because of this invasive American species called the signal crayfish. I went back there to try and see if I could find any of these indigenous crayfish and I did manage to find them, but the range is reduced by a lot now. The text about the crayfish comes from a fishing forum and it’s just this extremely conservative, kind of stern, mediating voice that tells you how you should feel about this ecological process that’s been catalysed by people, that’s now happening of this other species, and succeeding. The “native species” has a lot of parallels with wider political sentiments I feel about indigenousness or nativeness in these landscapes, in these places like they’re two sides of the same coin. You have people who have opinions about what should be in that place and how it should look and the order that it should be in and I just want to disrupt that a bit. The dogs appear as well in the anecdote that Adam [Benmakhlouf] tells us about visiting my friend who lives on a queer land project outside of Glasgow. With this anecdote where their two dogs went crazy and then obviously the landscape and texture of the landscape itself is inherent throughout.
LT:I was just going to say that the dogs are quite interesting because there’s lots of interpretations that one is like a dog and the other one’s a wolf.
AB:Yeah.
LT:Which is quite similar to this idea of a dog being kind of like man’s best friends, so to speak. Then the wolf is, I guess in a lot of Western kind of fables, the deceitful and dangerous person or figure, which is quite interesting.
AB:There’s a lot of like stuff in this tarot deck about binaries or dualities. So you have the two dogs, like the wild one and the tame one. Order and chaos, whatever you want to call that. Then there are a lot of coded masculine and feminine presences throughout the rest of the deck and I think that’s something that I’ve spoken about before. I thought about this quite a lot and was trying to work with those received ideas, quite solid ideas, of two simple opposing things and then a grey area in-between. That’s literally what is happening in the moon card actually, as you have a path leading between two; a wild dog or a wolf and a tame dog, and the two towers that oppose each other. I think that’s something that in trying to re-read, we read those received narratives as queer people. You sort of still have to acknowledge that those are realities or are taken as realities for a lot of people and you’re still working between those two objects between quite rigid ideas or something.
LT:Yeah. This sort of binary between night and day. When I was looking through the deck, the moon appears in three cards; but it’s always in a day, not a night sky because there are tarot cards that have night skies and darkness, but none of them contain the moon. It’s quite interesting how the moon is uncannily appearing in these light day skies as opposed to night.
AB:That’s something that I like about the tarot is that these little symbols occur throughout. It’s not necessarily just part of the scene setting or something on the moon. It’s not meant to tell you that it’s night time. It’s meant to tell you that there’s like a feeling of unease, or like a direct connection to an emotional undercurrent or something, which is totally what the moon card is about. When the moon appears in a different card, it’s like I need to listen to this. The high, the high priestess is one isn’t it? Where that’s completely about listening to an unconscious or subconscious intuition. That the moon’s journey, as the subconscious or emotional journey. The decision to use the moon cards more prominently than other tarot cards in this video is to state things as out of proportion. The reflected light where it creates an uneasy kind of light on everything, nothing’s particularly clear. Then this kind of nightmarish but not scary. Everything’s grotesque or everything’s distorted somehow. It creates this feeling that is like a very queer state of being specifically when you think about being queer in response or in relation to a place and all of it’s inherited or, inscribed narratives that it carries with it when you were over there. So that was something I was interested in as well.
KK:You get that feeling from watching the film, an uneasy feeling of stories being told and then you’re not really sure where these moments are going. I guess that that was something that was interesting and we were thinking about the voices and, creating moments of confusing and these uneasy and uncanny things that can describe queer oral histories ,or was it queer bodies that you were saying?
AB:Well, both. There’s obviously a bit of a focus on how a body feels in place, because there’s all of this footage of getting into the very cold water and being in the water. It’s definitely from a bodily position. I was trying to detach from any sort of directly verifiable or understandable experience and just tell anecdotes or stories that aren’t from their own position. It’s not clear who’s telling what story and it’s not clear how they’re building off of that. There’s no momentum. It’s just things happening. Adam narrates the story about the dogs while something completely different is happening on the screen. You have to follow the two of them together, although they’re similar, I guess if you didn’t know, you would make an association that Adam was narrating what was being shown to you. I just wanted to detach everything like that from it’s kind of source and just have things happening at the same time, but not harmoniously.
LT:I think it was interesting when you spoke before about the landscapes on the tarot being reminiscent of Scottish landscapes, which I’d never really thought of before but since you said it keep looking through them and seeing that as well.
AB:For me they are reminiscent of those landscapes especially the ones that are of the coast or seaside. There is never just a flat expansive ocean, it always shows islands out there and that has a sort of archipelago West coast kind of feeling. It’s a really specific landscape I think and it’s always reminded me of that.
LT:The archive footage of the ruins at West End for me, when I looked at it, the landscape almost felt a bit like the moon on earth. Are you trying to find something reminiscent of the moon on earth? It’d be interesting as obviously the West End is a submerged village, that’s now a reservoir and you can only see bits of it. When I was reading about it online, when it had some periods of drought the village ruins start to appear and it’s a kind of touristy thing. I think maybe you can tell us a bit more about it.
AB:Firstly, the moon doesn’t appear explicitly in the film. I feel like I should say this because this conversation makes it sound quite a complex and serious, but actually it’s a very, very stupid film. I watched it again the other day and it is actually incredibly stupid and quite puerile. There’s quite a lot of like pants dropping and mooning going on in it! Which was another very bad pun or something? I never really thought about just like filming the moon it wasn’t specifically just about that. It was more about the moon tarot and the feelings and the associations and its symbolism. It has bums, lots of bums which is always nice to see!
[Collective laughter]
The second point you made about the West End the footage of the reservoir is just ripped off YouTube. Again, nearly all of the actual content of this film is just like ripped or very simply taken. Um, it’s not really heavily researched. Thruscross Reservoir is close to where I grew up and it’s somewhere that I’ve known through my whole life as having a village underneath it which is very spooky and very otherworldly. There’ve been a couple of famous droughts within my lifetime where it’s been visible; I’ve never actually really seen it. Although if you walk along the top of the reservoir, there’s an old mill building that is half in the water. I found amazing footage of this guy narrating himself; he’d been involved in the actual construction of the reservoir, the dam. He is narrating and going round it again and looking back at the buildings. He has this incredibly familiar voice for me, which has this dry and level and completely unironic voice that is just hilarious to listen to. I think it just says a lot about the mentality of that place. For me, it just speaks volumes and the way that he narrates his journey around this reservoir, and he’s having this little nostalgia trip. The footage is in this degraded VHS or something. He also nearly gets stuck in the mud and says that he nearly dies and he’s screaming for help. I can’t kind of imagine doing that, but that’s fine. It was just this, absolute gold for me is that I couldn’t leave that out.
I’m regretting it a bit now though, because there’s actually a lot more in the landscape of Thruscross and the Washburn Valley that is very interesting. I was going to be making a project about it for Glasgow International this year (2020) until it was obviously cancelled or delayed. I’m kind of regretting giving it such a part of this film now because I feel like it would have been excellent to just draw into that material a bit more. The whole thing about the submerged village under the reservoir, I guess I liked the association villaging centres. And especially then thinking about like a gay village or something like a really, again, really stupid way. But thinking back about the community and the way that queer community exists in art, it exists just slightly under the surface and we have the same reference points as everybody else, but it’s sort of, you use them or read them in a different way. You have a different understanding of the same things or something like that.
I also love this kind of slightly fantasy-ish association of an underwater village. And that’s thinking about the tarot again and thinking about how you sort of engage with these scenes and the scenery landscapes in this tension. For example, the way that the guy who’s narrating that video [about West End] and the guy on the fishing forum are presenting their interaction with this landscape, is factual and I know that these bodies govern this space. I know that it was built by these people. I know that this species is meant to be here and this species is not. And then there’s kind of like feeling your way through it and not really listening to those kinds of lines or boundaries but just actually like feeling in a very sensory way through this space; it requires a little bit of fantasy — a little bit fantasising.
KK:You really get that feeling from it. The voice sounds so objective and so very authoritarian and very direct. But then the other authors or voices kind of have this more imaginative kind of feel.
AB:There’s something about that voice which is just at least very didactic, like he wants you to know what it knows about this place and you are meant to learn from it and that forbids you — or puts some barrier up for you having your own relationship with it. It tells you the terms in which you’re meant to relate to that landscape. And that was absolutely, on my mind throughout and has been while making this kind of this body of work where Submerged Village I guess, was the first. I included the ‘Yes’ badge [from the Scottish Independence referendum campaign]. The Scottish collective imagination relies on these landscapes, this very majestic kind of landscape and in a way that I am kind of very much seduced by them. Landscapes kind of contribute to these political ideas about belonging. The film was made three years after the Independence Referendum but that was still really on my mind, like really, really on my mind, a lot during that time. Thinking about if there is going to be Independence or what do we want to achieve? Who has ownership over this land? As an English person who’s lived in Scotland for all of my adult life and who voted for Independence and really had a lot of energy for that, I guess. Maybe it felt important and still feels important for queer people in the UK to be making work about place and how we have a voice in a place. Just unpicking those kinds of received voices that purport to speak for these landscapes.
LT:You travel in the film to this bothy and you have this book full of writing and it almost feels like you’ve created all this kind of content, or you’ve been writing together, or you’ve been doing something in some sort of collaborative way when actually it’s almost elements that have been pulled from something else.
AB:The book in the bothy is the guest book that we found there when we went there. They usually have like a comment book and it was just funny what people had written in this book. It revealed a lot about how people feel entitled to speak when they are several miles away from a paved road. Like primal opinions that they may have show themselves. One thing that stuck out to me was that somebody had written, ‘I identify as a toaster.’ This phrase is emblematic of the kind of kick back on the internet from sad people who are like really not all right with people being able to talk about their gender in expanded ways. It’s just like a cliche, a joke — ‘you can identify as anything you want now’. You know that you can marry a dog now if you want, this kind of like stupid, really conservative, but also really, really basic criticism of queer conversations that are now fringing onto the mainstream. And somebody had written that in this book and it was just like, wow! This reveals that this is now in the psyche of people in this country; like really deeply. It was quite… strange to see that there.
And then the other thing that was there was this absolute screaming rant written in very angry capitals about these kayakers who were probably English and all of this. And it’s just, how angry can you get? How entitled do you feel to this land? Like it’s not yours any more than it is anybody else’s, it’s actually owned by a private estate. So maybe that’s the thing that you should be getting angry about, not that it’s being used by English kayakers. So many people are battling each other for this land. People feel like they have a really emotional ownership of it. It’s like “I’m this like… rugged kind of Scottish outdoorsman and when I see English people doing outdoor pursuits here, it devalues that and makes me feel less legitimate,” or something. In the same way it is like a very emotional place, that bothy, because it’s a ruined village, which was depopulated (I assume during the clearances or maybe afterwards) so there’s this history of violence there. At present it’s used as a pretty location for outdoor sports or something, which sits very uncomfortably with that history. You can say that for a lot of that coastline; but these two things are just like so charged in this little notebook that people have left their comments in.
LT:When you say it like that the comments book is no different from the comments section of an Instagram post or something. It shows people’s entitlement and also like this anonymity, like when you’re not having to be accountable for your words.
AB:I just wanted to take care to only sort of include that as something that me and the people that are in the film sort of like… not respond to but I wanted to take care to just put us in that landscape, not in a sort of like occupying way, but just to show that we are there as well. I guess like suggestion in the film that some kind of gay sex has just happened in the bothy or whatever. This also exists in this space, you know, like it’s not just owned by the big birthday bash groups and the hill walkers and the kayakers.
The whole thing started from thinking about friendships and home. Specifically building a home in some way, but not in a really, concrete or finished way. And not in a physical way, particularly, but just thinking about how you relate to the place that you live and the way that you sort of build it for each other. And the way that you imagine something together.
Anyway, I wasn’t trying to lay any claim to this land in any way. I think about fantasy a lot and about how fantasies are like a desire for an unattainable object. It’s never realised, or if it is, it’s never the same as it was in the fantasy. It’s like following a path of desire or something, you could be in these places in emotionally and erotically charged ways and build this little closed space, which is the film itself. So within the space of this film you have a landscape that is populated by people that I know but also like Justin Bieber, because there are Justin Bieber nude photos in it as well of him like swimming in this waterfall in Hawaii or something! These different sorts of presences are all kind of like contributing to one sort of fantasised space.
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