Alexis Kyle Mitchell
B&W/Colour 16mm film, Video, 5.1 Surround Sound, 60 minutes, 2024.
Music by Luke Fowler and Richy Carey
Sound design + Mix by Richy Carey
“What do you do with death and dying when they can no longer be pushed to the outer limits of your lived experience or dismissed from your conscious mind? How do you live with death or rather how do you ‘live death’ - a formula which might seem at first glance to defy understanding - when death comes too close, pervading the air you breathe?"
– Jacqueline Rose, The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, 2023
The Treasury of Human Inheritance is a poetic film about the experience of living with and alongside genetic disease and disability. Tracing loops, echoes and repetitions across the physical and spiritual realms, ‘The Treasury’ combines documentation of family home movie footage; somatic and religious rituals for death and life after death; abandoned urban architectures teeming with natural growth; celluloid film hand-processed in genetic material; and an analogue synthesizer soundtrack that mimics inheritance patterns of genetic disease. In essence, this is a film about a family – but, more than that, it is a film made from the everyday patterns we embody in order to live through and with one another.
Alexis and I worked together over a number of years to create the soundtrack; assembled from home video recordings, answerphone messages, field recordings, voice notes and analogue synthesiser sequences made by Luke Fowler that mimic inheritance patterns of genetic disease.