Developed through a period of research in Matera, Italy—a city whose landscape has served as the backdrop for numerous cinematic representations—this installation considers the relationship between place, image and the forms of mythologising through which cities and states become legible and legitimated. Understanding ‘backdrop’ as an operationalisation of landscape, and ‘voiceover’ as an overwriting narration, the work attends to the ways in which both cinema and tourism produce amnesiac scripts of place. In the installation, a bisected cinematic assemblage of unstable representations and composite geographies attempts to counterpose these scripts.

The footage was recorded during a number of walks through the city, with the camera hanging loosely across the body, recording continuously, without focus or foreground. The text was assembled from fragments of conversations transcribed over three days of walking. Shared anecdotes, observations, uncertainties and moments of forgetting merge into the continuous, single voice of an errant narrator, whose speech wavers between recollection and disorientation.

Troubling Nietzsche's figure of the forgetful beast, whose capacity to forget precludes the possibility of speech, the text imagines a sudden, excessive remembering: a voice being found through a rush of recollection, entering a propulsive motion but unable to order or contain what it has to say. The text threads across a series of postcards, exceeding the limits of their individual surfaces. Image and text are pulled apart from their usually unified flow as cinematic backdrop and voiceover, producing a narrative of an inchoate, yet to be determined, city.