Rehana Zaman
2K Video / 16mm film, stereo, 2023
Sound design & mix by Richy Carey
Everything Worthwhile is Done with Other People takes up the conversations, experiences and freedom dreams of a group of women affected by the carceral state, as encountered through the UK government’s hostile environment policy and prison system. This work began as a series of workshops led through Hibiscus Initiatives framed around questions of criminality, innocence and citizenship, perceived through the lens of gender, race and class.
Over the course of the last five years the group created a collectively authored film held and nurtured through many shared meals, blossoming friendships and periodic trips to the beach. As the process of their gathering drew to a close, a polyvocal hybrid film has emerged, offering a small glimpse into a group’s attempt to connect and form against punitive contexts that strive to diminish, reduce and disappear. The work continues to articulate how in spite of these conditions, solidarity and love, can and does prevail. (+)
Rehana had already collected all the location sounds with the group, and came to the studio for a week to work on the film’s soundtrack, creating gentle sound design for certain passages and working on cleaning up the recordings and mixing the film. We then went on to work remotely for a time, making edits in response to feedback from the group and of our own, before finalising the soundtrack.
(+) Mariame Kaba,“Eve L. Ewing, Everything Worthwhile Is Done With Other People,” ADI Magazine (Fall 2019). Commissioned by Serpentine Civic.