Although film features strongly in Matthew Buckingham's work, he is also the author of drawings, photographs, slide projections, postcards, plaques (on bus stop benches), videos and essays. Always meticulously researched and documented, his work seems to be ‘about’ the construction of histories, and the peculiar blending of fact and mythology that is necessary for their emergence. And he takes a long view of history, reminding us that we are now in the sixth century of ‘globalisation’.

So despite the mass and detail of interest in his work from the point of view of film theory, there is much at stake in it that is more than theoretical. Most obviously, his placement of film within ‘installation’ suggests a concern to create situations that are experienced physically, in a ‘disorderly’ way through the body, not simply apprehended through the ‘ordered’ intellect.

Narration is a way to order our experience, and Buckingham’s focus on the way in which people narrate their experiences reveals the availability of other methods of social and political navigation. Used as we are to narratives with conclusions, the work may seem unresolved, but this is precisely where it is also transformative: it insists on a certain level of disorientation to encourage us to ‘unlearn’ our perceptual habits and offers the potential to discover new ways of experiencing the world.

Lewis Biggs