Moving Image
My moving image practice brings together artist film, visual poetry, artist documentary, and video art. I work from within lived experience, using moving image to explore memory, migration, belonging, embodied experience, and the fragile spaces where personal histories meet landscape, sound, and symbolic form.
Selected Works
Artist documentary / moving image
Substrata
Substrata begins with a question that emerged within my own family: what does it mean to grow up with a mixed-race background, as part of generations shaped by migration, displacement, and cultural crossings? Developed from real conversations with my family during the first lockdown, and in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests in the UK, the film moves through Calabria, the sea, the Thames Estuary, and London to explore mixed heritage, belonging, and the search for roots across multiple geographies and histories.
Through poetry, rhythm, and a richly collaborative soundtrack created with musicians, composers, and performers from the UK and Italy, I use moving image to trace identity not as something fixed, but as something carried, layered, and transformed across generations. Made during severe lockdown restrictions and shaped through remote collaboration, Substrata is both an intimate artist documentary and a wider meditation on what connects us beneath inherited categories of race, nation, and origin.
Visual poetry / MOVING IMAGE
H.J. and the Mermaid of the Estuary
H.J. and the Mermaid of the Estuary is a work of visual poetry created in dialogue with poet Barry Fentiman. Written as a call and response between two voices, the film brings together the figure of the mermaid and the headless golem as symbolic presences shaped by the histories and tensions of the Thames Estuary. Developed during my recovery from severe Covid, the work moves through transformation, estrangement, hybridity, and the difficulty of inhabiting a body — and a world — that no longer feels familiar. Moving between realist estuary imagery and increasingly fragmented, abstracted visual language, the film uses metaphor, colour, and rhythm to hold questions of difference, vulnerability, and the conflict between change and resistance.
Experimental video art
Yellow Steps
Yellow Steps is a vertical video work shaped by the experience of physical limitation and breathlessness in the aftermath of Covid, at a time when the language of long Covid had not yet entered public understanding. Using my phone to record the act of climbing ten floors of stairs, I turned a simple physical test into a claustrophobic audiovisual study of effort, resistance, and collapse. Through an increasingly fractured treatment of image and sound, the work transforms the staircase into both an architectural structure and a psychological space: a vertical passage marked by strain, repetition, and the desire to move upward beyond the limits of the body.
VIDEO PERFORMANCE / VIDEO ART
Indifferent
Indifferent is a process-based video work first developed in 2007 and produced with the support of Careof in Milan. Using a fixed camera, I placed two blindfolded participants of different cultural backgrounds in an empty room with a single rule: they could do anything except speak. Coloured marbles were positioned between them as a simple, pre-linguistic invitation to play.
Through this minimal structure, the work reflects on indifference, separation, and the difficulty of contact between Italian and immigrant communities in the early 2000s, using play as a metaphorical attempt to strip away social codes and observe what remains.
The work was screened internationally and was later presented in installation form at the Human Rights? festival, Fondazione Opera Campana dei Caduti, Rovereto, in collaboration with Amnesty International and UNESCO.
Selected Screenings & Exhibitions
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Substrata Premiere — Cinema Étoile, La Trimouille, France, 2021
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Human Rights? #EDU — UNESCO, Rovereto, Italy, 2019
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Geometry of Memory — Ta-Da, Copenhagen, 2016
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Platform — Turner Contemporary, Margate, 2014
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Transformation — Selma Feriani Gallery, London, 2013
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Tina-B Festival — Vernon Gallery, Prague, 2013
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European Horizons — Riihisaari Museum, Savonlinna, Finland, 2013
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The Zone — Hundred Years Gallery, London, 2013
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Magmart — PAN, Naples, 2010
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The Night of Museums: Sounds and Visions — National Gallery, Cosenza, 2010
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Contaminazioni — S. Chiara Museum, Cosenza, 2010
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KURYE International Video Festival — Istanbul, 2009
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International Film Festival Carbunari — Florean Museum, Romania, 2007