What is lost and gained in the liminal space between material transfers and auratic traces?
Affiliation Ritual is a 16mm film which dialectically engages with the nature of film practice through its aesthetic economy of production. The film is an outcome of process-based research which uses anthropologist Tim Ingold’s methodology of ‘haptic making’ to archive a series of frottaged ironing boards.
Ingold suggests materials are alchemical and should be treated as though they are in a state of flux. Frottage’s material conversion into a filmic mode muddies notions of ocular-centricity through its privileging of haptic images, a world felt through touch. Extending upon the work of practitioners interested in the structures of cinema and theatre such as Bertolt Brecht, Peter Cripps, and Lars Von Trier, the cinema is conceptualised as a mode of both display and archive, the film as a work in progress presents a space of encounter and ambiguity.