Crossing the Dunes aka Gossip (2021)
Movie, 30 minutes
The film frames the symbolic principles that govern our lived reality as myths: the myth of Switzerland, the myth of nation, the myth of categorisable identity; echoing Barthes diagnostic of the ideological utility of mythologies. Yet, instead of simply critiquing the ideological myth, the lmmakers propositionally present “gossip” as an alternative method of interpretation, perception, and storytelling. If myth is ideological, then gossip is social.
Gossip is a verbal practice of social bonding, an informal mode of information sharing associated with women and marginalised communities which leaves room for interpretation and adaption. Gossip makes no declarations of universal truths. It’s about time gossip was reclaimed from the demonised connotations bestowed upon it by the myth-making institutes. rough both form and content, the lm presents “gossip” as a method for navigating these mythologies in a way that reinstates the complex agency of the “self” within them. By privileging a form of “storytelling from below” Crossing the Dunes AKA Gossip adeptly tethers the intimate to the political, the theoretical to practice, and the symbolic to the embodied, whilst providing abundant conceptual space for their generative entanglements.
- Movie: Clara Saito and Livio Casanova
- Text: Bethany Crawford
- Thanks to: Polly Wright, Bethany Crawford, Ciaran Wood,
