This phrase and its possible readings form the starting point for various operations of collision and collage, performed across three screens with materials including interviews recorded on site, video footage of the city and its surroundings, the architecture of its barriers, and the encampments of those who attack these barriers, as well as extracts from film, advertising, corporate PR, journalism, theoretical writing and historical documentation.

Constructing lines of flight from these assemblages of materials, No More Beyond hovers between different modes of interpretation, from the poetic to the investigative, from the ambiguous to the polemic, while remaining motivated by a radical questioning of the ethics of segregation, of inside and outside, and a curiosity to lay bare the ideological operations that produce these divisions, as well as the cracks and fissures in European discourses on rights that they betray. No More Beyond takes the boundary not just as the line of separation, but also at the threshold where the violence that sustains inequality erupts and is forcibly revealed.

There is an ongoing online screening of No More Beyond at The Unstitute, and the video can be downloaded in its entirety from its Vimeo page.

Camera: Vanessa Bowles, Ghislain Yakam
Location Sound: Matthias Kispert
Fixer: Jesús Blasco Avellaneda
Interviewees: Imad, Jesús Blasco Avellaneda, Donald, Mohammed, Boris, Abou, Abou
Video + Sound Edit: Matthias Kispert
Script: Matthias Kispert
Voiceover: Lucy Ellinson, Vanessa Bowles, Matthias Kispert
Research: Matthias Kispert, Vanessa Bowles
Translation: Vanessa Bowles, Maya Chami, Pierre Bouvier Patron, Blanca Regina, Artur Vidal
Thanks to: Maya Inbar, Angus Carlyle

Voices in a Field took place on 5th October 2013 on the site of The Island, an urban wasteland in the centre of Nottingham. The resulting documentation was shown later at the Recreation Ground exhibition at ATTIC, Nottingham. The project was commissioned by Wasteland Twinning Nottingham.

Unlike the BBC programme of the same name which rose to the solemnity and grandeur of the occasion, in the video The Funeral of Baroness Thatcher the camera lingers on the actions of bystanders who are watching the proceedings from behind crowd control barriers. It was filmed at the place where little over a year earlier the Occupy London camp was evicted after four months of peaceful protest.

The sound track features recordings from the location, including the voices of both Thatcher critics and supporters, either as they are being interviewed by journalists, or as they engage in arguments with other members of the crowd. This ambience recedes into the background however, submerged under a rendition of a song about death and the afterlife. Akin to the lyrics’ wavering between desolation and comfort, its function in the piece is ambiguous: It might be addressed to the mourners at the funeral, to supporters of Thatcherite politics who hope for these to continue, to their opponents who vow to keep up their fight, or to bystanders who hope immortalise moments of their lives by capturing them on camera.

Films like Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991) or Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004) have as their subject stories played out in the confines of a taxi cab and the brief yet at times bizarre encounters that can happen there. D-Fuse’s ongoing project Brief Encounters/By the Meter takes inspiration from these films, skirting along the line between fact and fiction in a series of open-ended impromptu interviews with taxi drivers from different cities. Recorded en route, the drivers are invited to talk about their personal history, their home town, the memorable rides they have experienced, and the poignant tales that emerge from this range from the lighthearted to the profound.

Brief Encounters/By the Meter was inaugurated during the Sound Development City summer expeditions in 2012.

→ D-Fuse
→ D-Fuse Vimeo
→ Sound Development City

Apart from the cameras, public address systems on public transport and in other places where large numbers of people pass, are used to broadcast regular messages about how and how not to behave.

Secured by Design creates a simple yet poignant image of this climate of all-pervasive ambient fear. The video is made up of hundreds of photos of surveillance cameras taken in various locations across London, with a soundtrack made from recordings of various public security announcements. The cameras, slowly spinning in search for potential subjects to spy on, hover at the centre of the screen like an ominous presence, while the background changes continuously. Wherever you are in London, someone is watching you.

Commissioned by Heller Entrerprises for the video series Keine Stadt wie diese (No City Like This) by the German Ministry for Transport, Construction and Urban Plannning.

→No City Like This
→D-Fuse
→D-Fuse Vimeo

The video contains interviews with local residents who were passing by the march on its route from Dalston to Tottenham.

→Blanca Regina