Third Person (Plural) forms a trilogy, a layered project that unfolds across a multi-screen installation, a feature-length essay film, and an artist’s book. The project is rooted in an extensive archival collection of over 200 postwar U.S. informational films and newsreels sourced from the Library of Congress and the American National Archives. Originating as a quest to source documents of the early European integration processes in the post-war United States, the project unfolds into an expansive feminist re-reading of the hegemonic masculine gaze and its manifestation in material images. This is a bracing encounter with the gaze that produced the ‘image’ of the world as the new, Western order bound by the notion of a united Europe, the delirium of the Cold War and decolonisation processes.
The symbiotic relations between the military industrial complex and Hollywood, enabled American newsreels companies to create a global news system that pooled into its centre representations of ‘others’, and as such created a certain conception of the ‘global’ and of ‘global geography’. It produced the ‘rest of the world’ for American viewership, fixing others in place, in a system of temporal and spatial knowledge. By casting a female gaze Third Person (Plural) questions the role of image production technologies (film, newsreels and photography) in the construction of dominant historical narratives, while paying tribute to the ‘unseen’ glances, making visible a collective ‘third person’. From propaganda clips to making visible the collective ‘they’, the project is constructed as a continuum.
INSTALLATION
Third Person (Plural) installation is the first iteration of the project, with the 8 episodes presented in separate square TV monitors. The authoritative male disembodied voice of the newsreel, describing events and guiding the reading of images, is challenged by the collaging of fragments (a type of collaging that places film clips into new historical, contextual, thematic, gender, temporal and spatial relationships) and by the use of popular culture material sourced from the internet. The joining together of clips does not follow a chronological order. Rather is based on a temporal dislocation and a spatial destabilization of the global narratives that they highlight.
THIRD PERSON (PLURAL) FILM
Third Person (Plural) film follows the episodic structure of the installation, while introducing another rupture through the adaptation of informational films produced by the first institutions of the European union. These clips become the forces that join the re-edited 8 episodes. By allowing for the incidental, and by embracing expanded associative thinking, the film challenges the function of the archive (the images that survive) by allowing diverse material to enter its closed system.
THIRD PERSON (PLURAL) BOOK
The Third Person (Plural) Artist’s Book acts as both a companion and a counterpoint to the installation and film. Structured in eight chapters that mirror the film’s episodes, the book translates moving images into still form through the visual language of the illustrated popular press. The chapters are punctuated by “letters to the editor,” emerging as collaborative readings of the archival material and reflecting a multiplicity of voices, with contributions by Eray Çaylı, Ciara Chambers, Claire Delahey, David Kazanjian, Shoair Mavlian, Andrei Siclodi, and Su Wei. Each chapter takes the form of a magazine issue; when compiled and bound together, the book moves across formal boundaries, existing simultaneously as a catalogue, an academic interpretation, and a compelling work of art.
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