Not Quite Alive

‘Not Quite Alive’ is a sculptural installation combining moving image, sculpture and sound. This work explores reinvention, hybridity and belonging. The film begins with a translucent head rising from the soil, comprehending its own corporeality and surveying its surroundings. Perhaps it is an alien life form dropped into the woodland, or a terrestrial being exhumed from the soil. In this landscape, things and sounds are disorientated, inverted and displaced. The movement of the trees above appears unfamiliar and cybernated, and the psithurism is electronic. Maybe the transhuman body in Not Quite Alive is a mediator; a prosthetic mouthpiece for the archival, emerging from the passive yet omniscient soil and the legacies of colonialism carved into it. Its testimony, a detuned, ambiguous voice, recites lines from Sun Ra’s The Satellites Are Spinning: ‘The satellites are spinning / A new day is dawning / The galaxies are waiting / For planet Earth’s awakening.’ (Sun Ra, 1971). Satellites must spin to remain stable in relation to the rotation of the Earth. They must be dynamic and evolving but outwardly appear constant.