Looners (2019) is a kaleidoscopic fantasy filmed in the immense ruins of Hollywood film sets in the Atlas Mountains. Leading us across a series of fantastical worlds performers, anonymised by silicone masks, enact scenes of ritualised pleasure and violence in a manner simultaneously ludicrous and grotesque. This unruly species, somewhere between human and monster, are compelled towards abject repetitions by obscure libidinal drives, ‘a kind of love-as-violence, and violence-as-love’, repeatedly hazing their captive latex inflatables.
Rejecting all binary classification–––of real and virtual, front and back stage, male and female, self and other, rationality and madness, surface and subtext, style and content, time and space––– the film instead embraces multiple selves, instability and deviance.
Commissioned by Hayward gallery for ‘Kiss my Genders’ (2019)
Press/Writing:
Imminent Queerness by James Lawrence Slattery
Looners is performed by Alex Margo Arden, Thomas Doherty, Kevin Brennan, Jenkin van Zyl, Slid Needham, Lola Tate, Adam Leach, Jack Appleyard, Edythe Woolley and Agnieszka Szczotkta. 1/34 scale miniature is sculpted by Ari Níelsson.
Stills from Looners (2019)