Fecund Geometries
Four ‘spatial studies’
Huda Awan
Being Blue
Director LUKE FOWLER
Year
2024
Country UK
On Weaving
Director LUKE FOWLER & CORIN SWORN
Year
2025
Country
UK
Available Light
Director
MORGAN QUAINTANCE
Year
2025
Country UK
![]()
Oneiric Kitchen
Director
CHIEMI SHIMADA
Year
2024
Country UK, JAPAN
Today, half of Marseille’s La
Cité radieuse—one of Le Corbusier’s first Unité d’habitation housing
projects—is comprised of the original residential apartments; the other half
functions as a hotel. I was brought to see the building during my first trip to
the city. Marie, the native-Marseillaise woman with whom I was staying, had a
friend living there and she took me to visit him one afternoon. From outside,
the building’s brightly-coloured balconies looked as if they’d been indented
into the façade, an effect accentuated by their contrast against the untreated
concrete on the front face. Inside, Marie’s friend—a sun-weathered psychiatrist
named Patrick—showed us around his home, where quadrilateral segments of the
warm wooden floors had been brought into vibrant tonality by the afternoon sun.
The kitchen was clad in a mixture of wood, tile, and stainless steel, the
bedroom windows framed by gauzy curtain. As I took in Patrick’s home—his simple
sophisticated furniture, his books, the irregular lacquered form of a vase
sitting on a handsome coffee table, the pubescence of the colour schemes, not
quite naïve, not quite mature—I began to feel a strange longing. A desire for a
window onto a balcony, and for the light-filled room behind it. A desire for a
flat that didn’t torment me, a desire to have things just so. Later, we left
Patrick’s flat to have a drink at the hotel bar; along the walkway there, the
teak-lined windows cut and arranged the light in curious geometry across
modernist tiles.
What is available is what is at hand and what is at hand is typically limited. The notion of ‘space’ denotes availability governed by given geometry. Or not; it’s possible these last lines are too tight, too constrained, hold too little leeway. Perhaps space is more elastic than geometries would suggest.
The opening shot of Luke Fowler’s Being Blue shows the external related from within; the sun sits stark on Derek Jarman’s shingle garden in Dungeness, its unruly shrub framed by the six glass panels of a door. Inside, meanwhile, relative darkness—the white paint of the door appears in grey. Prospect Cottage, from within which Fowler shoots, was bought by Jarman in 1986. In December of that year, he was diagnosed with HIV. The cottage was the artist’s home for the next seven years, and those years were the last of his life. The film was shot while Fowler was on residency at the cottage, which, together with its beguiling garden, has become an attraction for visitors to the sparse and arid landscape. With its bright yellow windows against the black, weatherproofed walls, there’s a way in which the cottage could be romanticised as a refuge where creative work abounds. Being Blue, however, is subtler and more capacious than idyll. In its sensitive layering of archival audio with contemporaneously captured field recordings, the film is not so much a portrait of Jarman, or of the cottage and its environs, as much as it is an act of richly imagined speculation. Fowler’s interpolation of his own subjectivity—he appears with camera in a mirror that catches a window looking out; his shadow casts itself against a wall in evening light—foregrounds supposition. Dungeness lies on England’s southern edge, a mere hamlet on a piece of pebbled headland that juts into the Channel. When Fowler’s camera fixes on Jarman’s paintings, made in violent brown and red impasto, and emblazoned with words like “HORROR”, “CMV”, and “VIRUS”, one has to wonder how bitter and sweet both it was for a gay man on the margins of Thatcher’s Britain to bring himself to that windswept edge—and there “create a garden in the wilderness” of terminality.
Ostensibly, the films in this programme are spatial studies. But, like Being Blue, On Weaving and Available Light go beyond the documentation of space to depict an experience of it, a depiction inscribed in each film’s form. On Weaving (a collaboration between Fowler and the artist Corin Sworn) takes High Sunderland as its site and subject—a modernist house “almost … woven or stitched into” the woodlands near Selkirk, Scotland. The house was designed by architect Peter Womersley in 1957 for the Serbian-born textile designer Bernat Klein. The film’s camerawork and editing accentuate the entwined quality of its design; the first shot of the house shows it partially obscured by a bare tree. Later, reflections of the Scottish woodlands are caught in the structure’s expansive windows, superimposing them in-camera onto interior views of the house.
There are many pleasing lines to be found in Morgan Quaintance’s Available Light—timber-panelled windows, the long-lengths of wooden floorboards, the brisk, angled steps of a teak ladder-staircase—many captured at the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum. Quaintance, however, complicates these pristine lines by interspersing them amongst interviews with the museum’s staff (one security guard recounts how the building appears in his bad dreams), and video footage of tours around cramped, fluorescently-lit flats. Quaintance’s edit posits a tension between the preservation of buildings past while the living struggle with stable housing. But the most evocative sections of this film (to me) are the distorted shots from inside Tokyo’s laundromats and commuter trains. In someone’s life, these sites are quotidian, but here they’re warped and bewildering, inducing the uncanny dislocation that arises when one strays beyond the threshold of their own native everyday. The film closes with Quaintance narrating a letter to the filmmaker Chiemi Shimada; he dreams of being hunted down as a stag, and describes footage he’s found in an archive, filmed with little regard for the subjects’ personal space.
The opening sequence of Available Light might abstract space into a set of geometrical lines, but Shimada’s Oneiric Kitchen conceptualises and creates a new kind of space: a workshop for insomniacs outside the realm of sleep. In this programme’s coda, timbered rooms are filled by people, and strange objects arranged on wooden floorboards convey their inner worlds. Here, the outsider finds refuge in the entwined nature of shared experience. The interior is not just externalised—it blooms into communality.
Huda Awan is a writer based in London, and the Editor of Open City Texts.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme ‘Available Light’ at Barbican Cinema, 9 May 2025.
What is available is what is at hand and what is at hand is typically limited. The notion of ‘space’ denotes availability governed by given geometry. Or not; it’s possible these last lines are too tight, too constrained, hold too little leeway. Perhaps space is more elastic than geometries would suggest.
The opening shot of Luke Fowler’s Being Blue shows the external related from within; the sun sits stark on Derek Jarman’s shingle garden in Dungeness, its unruly shrub framed by the six glass panels of a door. Inside, meanwhile, relative darkness—the white paint of the door appears in grey. Prospect Cottage, from within which Fowler shoots, was bought by Jarman in 1986. In December of that year, he was diagnosed with HIV. The cottage was the artist’s home for the next seven years, and those years were the last of his life. The film was shot while Fowler was on residency at the cottage, which, together with its beguiling garden, has become an attraction for visitors to the sparse and arid landscape. With its bright yellow windows against the black, weatherproofed walls, there’s a way in which the cottage could be romanticised as a refuge where creative work abounds. Being Blue, however, is subtler and more capacious than idyll. In its sensitive layering of archival audio with contemporaneously captured field recordings, the film is not so much a portrait of Jarman, or of the cottage and its environs, as much as it is an act of richly imagined speculation. Fowler’s interpolation of his own subjectivity—he appears with camera in a mirror that catches a window looking out; his shadow casts itself against a wall in evening light—foregrounds supposition. Dungeness lies on England’s southern edge, a mere hamlet on a piece of pebbled headland that juts into the Channel. When Fowler’s camera fixes on Jarman’s paintings, made in violent brown and red impasto, and emblazoned with words like “HORROR”, “CMV”, and “VIRUS”, one has to wonder how bitter and sweet both it was for a gay man on the margins of Thatcher’s Britain to bring himself to that windswept edge—and there “create a garden in the wilderness” of terminality.
Ostensibly, the films in this programme are spatial studies. But, like Being Blue, On Weaving and Available Light go beyond the documentation of space to depict an experience of it, a depiction inscribed in each film’s form. On Weaving (a collaboration between Fowler and the artist Corin Sworn) takes High Sunderland as its site and subject—a modernist house “almost … woven or stitched into” the woodlands near Selkirk, Scotland. The house was designed by architect Peter Womersley in 1957 for the Serbian-born textile designer Bernat Klein. The film’s camerawork and editing accentuate the entwined quality of its design; the first shot of the house shows it partially obscured by a bare tree. Later, reflections of the Scottish woodlands are caught in the structure’s expansive windows, superimposing them in-camera onto interior views of the house.
There are many pleasing lines to be found in Morgan Quaintance’s Available Light—timber-panelled windows, the long-lengths of wooden floorboards, the brisk, angled steps of a teak ladder-staircase—many captured at the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum. Quaintance, however, complicates these pristine lines by interspersing them amongst interviews with the museum’s staff (one security guard recounts how the building appears in his bad dreams), and video footage of tours around cramped, fluorescently-lit flats. Quaintance’s edit posits a tension between the preservation of buildings past while the living struggle with stable housing. But the most evocative sections of this film (to me) are the distorted shots from inside Tokyo’s laundromats and commuter trains. In someone’s life, these sites are quotidian, but here they’re warped and bewildering, inducing the uncanny dislocation that arises when one strays beyond the threshold of their own native everyday. The film closes with Quaintance narrating a letter to the filmmaker Chiemi Shimada; he dreams of being hunted down as a stag, and describes footage he’s found in an archive, filmed with little regard for the subjects’ personal space.
The opening sequence of Available Light might abstract space into a set of geometrical lines, but Shimada’s Oneiric Kitchen conceptualises and creates a new kind of space: a workshop for insomniacs outside the realm of sleep. In this programme’s coda, timbered rooms are filled by people, and strange objects arranged on wooden floorboards convey their inner worlds. Here, the outsider finds refuge in the entwined nature of shared experience. The interior is not just externalised—it blooms into communality.
Huda Awan is a writer based in London, and the Editor of Open City Texts.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme ‘Available Light’ at Barbican Cinema, 9 May 2025.