This collaborative film with Sasha Litvintseva interrogates digestion as the fundamental condition for being in the world, a process of physiological, psychological, spiritual, literary and scientific dimensions. Multiple storylines trace the poetics of incorporation as a matter of metamorphosis and decay, the philosophy of matter and imperial conquest, industrialisation and annihilation, poetry and parenting, love and citation.
Installation view M-Cult Museum Helsinki, Finland. photo credit: Anna Autio
Image Description: In a dark gallery space, a two-channel video installation coming from two projectors on the floor exhibit different views from the same architectural space.
My Want of You Partakes of Me emerged at the intersection of several overlapping trajectories in Beny Wagner’s personal and collaborative practice. One main trajectory was the practice component of his PhD (completed in 2023). Titled Metabolisms of Moving Image, the PhD was a study of the history of the concept of metabolism in western science and a series of speculations on the influence of metabolism on the emergence and development of moving image technologies. The other trajectory was the ongoing collaborative practice with Sasha Litvintseva. This film was the third in their collaboration, started in 2019. This loose trilogy has been driven by a critical interrogation of the western scientific construction of the human body.
Much of the research material that formed My Want of You Partakes of Me was accumulated over many years. As Beny Wagner notes, “These are stories, thoughts, anecdotes that have continuously fascinated me but always fallen just outside other projects. We wanted to deal with digestion as a process that fundamentally rejects limits or categorization. The film tries to create an experience of perpetual slippage, where digestion can at any point shift from being a physiological function, to a spiritual uncertainty, to a political reality, to a psychological framework. It also thinks about digestion as a problem of selfhood, particularly through the lens of our collaborative practice where a ‘third’ author emerges that is something beyond either of us but nevertheless contains important aspects of our selves.”
My Want of You Partakes of Me (2023) film still
Image Description: An upside view of a baby sitting on the ground in a park with a distorted, fish-eye lens.
From the beginning of the project, Wagner was aware of how impossible it would be to contain. Like the subject matter itself, the work was constantly spilling over. Wagner recalls “Our response was to work with the fragment as a means to embrace our own instincts at every moment in the process. Rather than drawing a boundary around the work, we welcomed a kind of associative multiplying as a working method.” This is reflected in the two narrative structures in the film that make up its 8 chapters. One narrative structure is delivered by voiceover and centers on 4 separate stories. The first is the story of the authors making the film. The second is of a British colonial expedition to Nicaragua in the late eighteenth century. The third is of the French physiologist Claude Bernard. The fourth is of Octavia Butler’s protagonist Anyanwu from her novel Wild Seed. Interspersed between each of these chapters are scenes in which 9 different narrators (a range of friends and acquaintances – all nonactors) read fragments of texts in a range of different environments (a home, a studio, a beautiful environment). The artists’ idea here was to engage the production of narrative and meaning making at different stages of completion as a way of opening the process of making a film.
A hugely important dimension of the film is the sound, which they worked on just as much as the story and image production. One of the most rewarding parts of this process was the collaboration with the sound artist Tom Fisher. There were many stages and layers to the sound production. Tom and Beny recorded a lot of sound on the filming locations. In a few cases Tom transformed those recordings into resonant frequencies which they then used to make new compositions. Alongside this work, Beny Wagner produced a range of electronic compositions. The work was constantly being passed back and forth, growing in this reciprocal exchange. In the final stage, they spent two weeks making the 5.1 surround mix, which was itself a way of composing spatially. Sometimes they think of this film, which, at 56 minutes is an unwieldy format, more like an album with 8 tracks that have a certain autonomy but which are part of a greater, cohesive project.
Collaboration was important at every stage of the project, notably with Jason Ramanah who made the excellent animations using the game engine Unreal, to create the tropical rainforest in Nicaragua. Each of the shoots came together through open conversation with the people they filmed, often coming up with ideas of where to film and how to film together. Most of the filming happened in London, so when they first screened the film at the Tate Starr Cinema it was a special moment that allowed many collaborators to experience it together. According to Beny, “The most complete version of the film, in my opinion, is as a two channel installation. When this has been installed properly in exhibitions, I really enjoy seeing people engage with the work spatially because the feeling of open-ended multiplicity really comes through in the nonlinear ways viewers encounter and stay with the work.”
My Want of You Partakes of Me was realized in part within the framework from the European Media Art Platform residency program at IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture] with support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union. Additional support came from the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, University of Southampton, and Queen Mary University London.
Installation view at SonicActs Biennale 2024 “The Spell of the Sensous”, W139, Amsterdam
Image Description: A dark exhibition space with neon light and objects. On the left, the two-channel video-installation is projected.
Beny Wagner, lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, works across moving image, text, installation and lectures, constructing non-linear narratives that explore the threshold of the human body in time. Wagner has explored themes ranging from histories of metabolism, to the social and political histories of measurement standardization, histories of animation at the intersection of science and art. Since 2017, much of his work is produced in the context of his long term collaboration with Sasha Litvintseva.
Credits:
Written and directed by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner
3D Animation: Jason Ramanah
Sound Design and sonic composition: Tom Fisher / Action Pyramid
Camera: Sasha Litvintseva
Original Score: Beny Wagner
Color grading: Anna Barsukova
Featuring: Roisin Tapponi, Petra Cox, Sam Keogh, Onyeka Igwe, Tai Shani, Daisy Lafarge, Shelby Prichard, Katherine Spence, Jason Ramanah, Tom Fisher, Adriana Hamelton, Moontaha Mahbub
