Points of Departure

Points of Departure, 2014, HD Cam, 16 minutes (extract above)

Viewers from the UK can watch the piece at the BBC Website by clicking here

Points of Departure uses archive footage of a collective past and combines it with personal recollections to fracture the normative culturally dominant view of Glasgow’s cityscapes and re-insert a Scottish Asian presence.

”After unsuccessfully searching the BBC archive for footage that I could relate to as a mixed race child growing up in Scotland, I formulated a set of rules governing how I would edit the footage: I could not find a human presence I could relate to, so I would only present footage where there was no human presence.

The initial concept for the voice over comes from a tablecloth I retrieved whilst clearing my father’s house; using a redundant artefact that had previously been imbued with what Bergson refers to as a ‘re-collective’ memory of domestic ritual to express my interaction with the archive. This develops through an Urdu song from the archive, and my father’s translation of that song. Both these aural elements are contrasted with documentary footage of Glasgow’s past. The combination of the overtly personal, together with the historical, creates the rubric from which subsequent registers of narrative emerge; this kaleidoscope allows different subjectivities to be produced.”
Alia Syed

Screenings
2014  TV as Material 1: Artists and Archive at the BBC Tate Modern London
2014 Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow

Exhibitions 
Points of Departure, Artefact 2019, Belgium