A Touch of Klass is a short art film on the subject of identity. The piece focuses on Black, male identity, however the subtext is applicable to anyone.Read more...
The film will be screened at the Dulwich Festival, Open House event, which features over 200 artists at more than 130 locations in the Dulwich area: www.dulwichfestival.co.uk There are further screenings planned. For an update on screenings, please keep in touch through my blog.
How do we define ourselves and how important is our identity?
For me identity has two aspects: external, which relates to how I look and how others see me; and internal, which relates to how I feel and think. They battle for centre stage and I live with these facets sometimes harmoniously and other times discordantly
My relationship with identity has changed over the years where the external facet seems to be taking more of a back seat.
To explore the subject further, I invited African and Caribbean men to share their thoughts and opinions through a series of interviews.
The interviews were conducted over a period of two weeks with nine participants. Although each interview told a different story there is a thread common to all, which draws them together, showing us something interesting and illuminating about Black identity.
Not wanting the film to be a stand alone-piece, I have examined how interactive web sharing sites can be used to link material together with people.
Only a fraction of the interviews were used for the film, but the content of each is so interesting that it was important that they were available to each participant and to others. They were edited down and uploaded to Sound Cloud.
To broaden and open up the topic to others, I have created a group on Flickr called: A Touch of Klass, where you can download your own identity tag, take a photo of yourself with your tag, upload to the group and add comments. You can get involved by visiting: Flickr.
The idea is to initiate a conversation on the subject. Most people relate to identity in some form or other and, although it is impossible to attach a single tag to oneself, there are some tags that have more personal significance, than others.
A friend asked me recently, what a potential love interest did for a living. The question of whether he was caring came later... so for her his "work" tag came before his "being" tag. This is not a criticism, but an observation on how we sometimes externally operate.
Of late there has been an upsurge in extreme right wing groups getting support and gaining recognition within society. Such groups are explicit that their belief system should become law, and exclude anything outside of this; the same could be said of other fundamentalist groups.
In the interviews conducted for this project, one of the contributors, Samson Ikharia speaks repeatedly on personas being a false representation of "true spirit". All interviews carry a similar sentiment, but his views are more vehement: Do fundamentalist groups lack true identity? Have they created such huge "personas" that they choose to kill or exclude rather than come to terms with who they truly are?
The distance between social and anti-social behaviour relies on emotional health, and identity plays an active part in a person’s well-being. I would like to expand on the work already done, to create a more fully researched representation of what I have come to understand.
A Touch of Klass is a beginning.
I shot the film in a hair salon - a Caribbean setting, which acts as a cultural backdrop and also, a sanctuary where thoughts and opinions get freely aired. What I like about the footage is the hair styling process: washed, blow-dried, and then tightly and meticulously cane rowed into a look... a layer chosen to externalise, to represent personality and form; In part, an identity.
