Leisure, Utopic, (2024)
Beatrice Gibson
Leisure, Utopic, Beatrice Gibson, England, S16mm > digital, 2 min, 2024
This short film is the first in a series of the artist’s adaptations of Utopia, a book published in 1984 by the New York poet Bernadette Mayer, specifically Chapter 4: “The Arrangement: of houses and buildings, of birth, of death, of money, of schools, of dentists, of birth control, of work, of air, of medicines, etc.”
Deriving from Mayer’s utopian program in the form of an inventory, a boy reads a version updated for other dispositions of arrangement, including more recent phenomena such as social media websites. As the boy reads, sometimes he stumbles over the words, his mother helps him, guides him. The desynchronization of sound and image frees the voices and faces, magnifies their presence: listening, attention, play, joy. The sensuality of 16mm acts like a luminous caress, an embrace. Leisure, utopia: the articulation of the two words states a double credo. 1: utopia, in any case as thought and as written by a non-binary poet like Bernadette Mayer, is a matter of everyday life, a form of life, here and now, one thing after another. 2: utopia is, or should be, child’s play.—Cyril Neyrat
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Open City Documentary Festival.
Image credits: all artworks, portraits, and stills courtesy the artist © Beatrice Gibson
About the artist
Beatrice Gibson (England) is a filmmaker born in London in 1978. Exploring the personal and the political and drawing on cult figures from experimental literature and poetry—from Kathy Acker to Gertrude Stein—her films are often populated by friends and influences, citing and incorporating collaborative processes and ideas. Gibson earned a PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths Centre for Research Architecture, University of London (2012). Her films have screened extensively at festivals and museums worldwide, including Cannes Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, London Film Festival, Courtisane Film Festival, Punto de Vista, Open City Documentary Festival, Centre Pompidou, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, ICA London, Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Mercer Union, and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2023 Fondazione Prada presented a complete retrospective of her films to date. Her work has received the Baloise Art Prize from the 17th Art Basel, two Tiger Awards for Short Film from International Film Festival Rotterdam (2009, 2013), and a Sublimage Award from FIDMarseille (2023). She has also been twice shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award for artists’ film (2013, 2019). With Ben Rivers, María Palacios Cruz, and Erika Balsom, she is a founding member of The Machine that Kills Bad People, a monthly cinema club held at ICA London. In 2021 Gibson founded Nuova Orfeo, a collectively run roving initiative for experimental film and music in Palermo. She lives and works in London, England, and Palermo, Italy.