Zombie Line

Zombie LineShipsides and Beggs ProjectsHD video with animation13min2015

Research which visual explores, through experimental video, the thematic motifs of mobility and boundaries. 

Within a context of European geo-political history, it develops a hybrid methodology to facilitate different registers which move across empirical and archival research; documentary, creative fiction and experimental film and audio as a way to explore two key motifs; the bicycle as a motif of mobility, and the wire as a motif of partition.

The complex bicycle motif utilises and augments archival footage of the UVF/36^thDivision Bicycle Brigade parading at Belfast City Hall, along with Mussolini’s address to bicycle wielding crowds in Rome, alongside the famous Liege-Bastogne bicycle race and also draws references from Alfred Jarry’s texts which explore the bicycle motif (Supermale, Dr Faustroll and The Passion). The mass-produced bicycle’s embrace of the idea of individual mobility and emancipation meets and merges with masculinity and fascism, an idea further explored in The Iron Way research.  The wire motif draws from locations around Bastogne (a key WW2 battleground) and sites in Northern Ireland and also resonates, literally, with the elevation data of Belgium’s frontiers (leading to Belgium/Luxembourg Frontier by Bicycle, featured inThe Iron Way).

Jarry’s pataphysical ideas inform much of the experimental film work, where a technique based around Shipsides’ developmental ‘pata-perception(Shipsides 2016) is developed to explore the geographic and gallery spatiality of the new Still Not Out of The Woods-Bastogne (Shipsides and Beggs Projects) installation that Zombie Linewas presented within.