
The Advantage of Seeing and Not Being Seen
Clever At Seeing Without Being Seen
Lee Campbell
United Kingdom
2021
Performance
Short Film
"What might it mean to remediate, excavate and bring back to life a personal archive of paintings and drawings and mobile phone footage made over 25 years through moving image and then remediate this remediation through live performance via Zoom?
Innovating the possibilities of media reuse, text feed-back and looping, and voice-overs, this multi-layered live multimedia Zoom performance is a colourful, immersive, textured, organic and disorienting montage of young queer experience told through my own personal autobiography. THIS was for me growing up gay in homophobic working class Britain in the 1990s and then coming to London in the early 2000s and being confronted with the implicit power relations attached to gay male social spaces. There are so many different references to decades of British history through different registers of image-making, language and bodies through a complex and repetitive system of layering, making the viewer continually question how many layers there are. With a parallel to our unconscious, with its many layers, many of which we do not have full access to.
The images that make up the green screen include drawings and paintings I made between 2005-2007 and 2018-2019, films and audio recordings on cell phones circa. 2005 and photos and recordings of moving images I took between 2011-2019 on various iPhones."
general information
edition
5th ECRÃ Festival
venues
Online
date and time
Friday 07/23/2021
duration in min
17
premiere
World Premiere 5th ECRÃ Festival
indicative classification
L / Free for all audiences / Free for All Audiences
conversation/chat
tags
art house, autobiographical, immersive, lgbt+
trailer/teaser/excerpt
complete work
Lee Campbell

Dr Lee Campbell describes himself as ‘a Londoner who makes experimental films and performance poetry about being gay and working class using barbaric humour and wit’. He uses poetry and experimental film as a way of telling autoethnographic stories/sharing personal narratives that are often raw, often painful, but always generous and authentic.
He graduated in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London in 2005 and received his PhD in 2016. He has recently performed at LGBT-centric online poetry events including INCITE! BBC Radio. His recent films have been selected for many international queer film festivals including Queerbee LGBT Film Festival, The Gilbert Baker Film Festival, Kansas 2020, HOMOGRAPHY, Brussels and STATES OF DESIRE: Tom of Finland in the Queer Imagination, Casa de Duende, Philadelphia, USA. He was selected for WICKED QUEER 2021 in Boston, USA, one of the largest and oldest LGBT film festivals in the world and will be screening one of his latest films at QUEER LIFE, EdgeZones gallery in Miami in May 2021. Recently interviewed by Hamish Downie for TWO GAY GEEKS. Upcoming shows include Cruising Dystopia curated by Berlin-based Nouvelle Organon. 2021 Nominee for Best Original Concept and 2021 Independent Horror Film Award for Best Atmosphere.
more information