Location: Scotland; Language: English; Captions: English

A short film commissioned by Fringe of Colour for the online arts festival, Fringe of Colour Films 2021. Space 2: We’ve Come A Long Way includes a developed sound-score, celebrating cycles, journeys and movement.

For the last year, Glasgow-based multidisciplinary artist Paix has been exploring space, in all its forms and meanings. Her work has led her to question this huge concept – how space, or Space, is defined, what it might mean to live there. It is the space between that captures Paix’s imagination, or “liminal space”.

Space 2: We’ve Come a Long Way interrogates the process and journey of moving through space. Through opulent visuals and striking gazes towards the camera, Paix shows us what it means to take up space in your environment, to exist boldly and to hold space as your own where you may have been otherwise denied a space to stand out. While billionaires race to be the first commercial owners of Space, Paix shows us that we all already exist as bodies in atmosphere, as spiritual, social and emotional beings trying to connect with our surroundings through body, mind and soul. In doing so, she marries this together with concepts of politics and identity. There has never been a more important time to interrogate our understandings of space and time through its associations with coloniality and heteropatriarchy. How do we detach our longing for space from these historical legacies?

The soundscape accompanying Space 2 comes from work on a film and theatre production in development, supported by Stella Quines. The original piece is a three-part journey that explores the experience of Black, women and non-binary Scots as they exist in Scotland.

The second part of the soundscape leads us to arrival in a new place, a new space, taking us through the journey of settling and building, and the chaos and joy that comes from doing so. Whether we have left our physical habitats, out of choice or by force, we find ourselves in new spaces internally and externally – we build, we connect, we thrive. There will always be moments of connection and disconnection, but this part of the story is about movement and the pleasure and pain in passage.

Space 2 takes a refrain from the original, sung piece – “we’ve come a long long way”, developing something celebratory and dance-oriented. Paix worked with collaborator and good friend Ben Vardi on remixing, re-working and developing the original piece with a new vision in mind. It is one that celebrates the journeys we are on as we are on them, rather than seeing space as a destination. There is no arrival, arrival is constant. We are here. We move. Even when we feel still, we are moving. As the earth orbits the sun, we are never stagnant. Even when we feel so in one element or facet of life, there are other parts of our being that are in motion.

For Paix, Space 2: We’ve Come a Long Waychallenges linearity and celebrates being. Present and presence.

Credits

Film by Paix

Composition and instrumentation - Paix & Zazim

Sound Design - Vardi

Performance Artist - Carine Barinia

Filming - Matthew Williams

Film editing by Tao-Anas Le Thanh

Captions by Sarya Wu

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About the Artist

Gillian Katungi is an artist, organiser and director. As a vocalist and performer she makes work under the persona Paix.

Her work experiments with multiple forms of expression and she enjoys moving in the space between established art forms. Her current offering is in audio visual form.

The power in her practice is centered around healing; self-exploration, love, the diasporic experience, queeriosity, oral storytelling traditions, the metaphysical, memory and her ancestral heritage.

In the spirit of re-imagining, her artistic process is currently centred around care and playful exploration without judgement and in creating space for what can and does emerge and flourish in safe and healing spaces that centre black intersectional experiences. This is reflected in her artistic practice but also in her own personal growth journey, as she incorporates and dissects the learning from her therapy training in order to see what to apply to her creative collaborative processes.

Recently she has been exploring 'space' in all its manifestations as an element of healing; connecting to voice, understanding herself and the body in relation to her environment, movement and finding love and home in self and community.

This film is the third film by Paix in her series of works exploring space. The soundscape is a celebratory piece looking at movement and the non linear journeys we undertake. The sound is a development of the second track from her audio visual project entitled, ‘We Thrive’, supported by Stella Quines Theatre Company.