The Limits of Looping


This film is looping, degrading, resting against the wall. Repeated but different each time. For our bodies in this room are not closed loops.


Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre is a detention centre located in dried open wheat fields, on the outskirts of Bedford. This banal British landscape has been walked scored and documented by many feet through many lenses. This landscape holds within it the continual violence that this State has always been capable of creating, disguising, invisibilizing. 

A 16mm film attempting but failing to capture the bucolic British landscape where Yarl's Wood IRC is situated. Leonie and Ishwari's voices question and unfold the hostility and violence held within banal structures of border control and institutions in Britain. The film and the audio are shown on separate loops, a 16mm projector and on tape, creating an asynchronous effect. Scratches start to develop as the film is looped through the projector. Continually playing the film and sound would cause slow irreversible degradation over time. 

This installation breathes and wobbles, like a performance. Despite the continual cycle of looping, no two viewings will be the same.

This film has screened at the Open City Documentary Festival 2021, New Contemporaries Online Platform 2022, Lucid Borders, ArtExchange, University of Essex, 2023

You can watch an excerpt of the digitised version of the film here (subtitled version also available):