After Work (2022)
Céline Condorelli and Ben Rivers
After Work, Céline Condorelli and Ben Rivers, England/Italy, 16mm > digital, 13 min, 2022
The film opens with a well-known British nursery rhyme, “Boys and Girls Come Out to Play.” It ends with a call, whispered in the ear at bedtime, to go and play and see what is going on in the street. This is precisely what Ben Rivers and Céline Condorelli suggest in After Work, the latter artist having been commissioned to design a playground in a working-class area of South London. On screen, we discover how it’s made—digging the earth, preparing the ground, welding, polishing. This is suggested through touches, captured by a camera playing with colours and overlaying, focused on the smallest snatches of gestures at work—a whole process splintered by an erratic chronology. The film is a focus of encounters, sometimes discordant, between worlds, between the poem and images, between work and play, the city and the animals, the adult world and the child’s world.—Nicolas Feodoroff
Poem by Jay Bernard.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Movimcat and Common Ground Gallery.
Image credits: all artworks, portraits, and stills courtesy of the artists © Céline Condorelli and Ben Rivers. Ben Rivers portrait courtesy © Oona Mosna.
About the artists
Céline Condorelli (Italy/France/England) is an artist and author born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, in 1974. Her artistic practice falls between installation, architecture, and public works, inquiring into forms of commonality and discursive sites. She received a PhD in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths College, University of London (2013). Her work has been exhibited at Gropius Bau, Singapore Biennial, Kunsthal Aarhus, Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, Gwangju Biennale, and other institutions worldwide. She was one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects in Birmingham, England. She is the author and editor of Support Structures (Sternberg Press, 2009) and was the 2023 National Gallery Artist in Residence. She lives and works between London and Lisbon.
Ben Rivers (England) is a filmmaker, artist, and curator born in Somerset, England, in 1972. He works in film, drawing, still photography, and installation, with projects ranging in theme from explorations of unknown wilderness territories to candid and intimate portraits of real-life subjects. He received a BA in Fine Art from Falmouth School of Art (1993). His films have screened widely around the world, winning numerous awards including a FIPRESCI International Critics Prize from Venice Film Festival, a Baloise Art Prize from Art Basel, two Tiger Awards for Short Film from International Film Festival Rotterdam, and an honourable mention from Media City Film Festival. He was twice shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award (2010, 2012). He was the recipient of a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard University (2014–2015) and was a Media City Film Festival Chrysalis Fellow (2019–2023). He lives and works in London.