Embryonic

A video collaboration by writer Fanny Howe and artist Maceo Senna.

Three figures - man, woman, child - roam the grounds of a State Mental Hospital, a kind of hell on earth, looking for each other or for a supreme witness to their loneliness. A visual poem with voices off.

When it's sunset in Purgatory and dawn on the Ganges it's noon on the Irish Sea. Filmed on Killiney Hill outside Dublin with John Manning remembering Samuel Beckett. The text echoes the Purgatory.

"There were several Brigids by the time she was ten and ready to leave Murroe. They multiplied through the shafts of air, one going one way another going another here and there around the countryside."

The above narrative, by Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, was written into her last notebook. The places filmed show where she lived and worked during that time. It was 1942-43.