B&W/Colour 16mm film, Video, 5.1 Surround Sound, 60 minutes.
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 architecture teeming with natural growth, celluloid film hand-processed in genetic material, and an analogue synthesizer soundtrack that mimics specific 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.
“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’ when death comes too close, seeming to enter the very air you breathe?”
– Jacqueline Rose, The Plague, 2023
Installation documentation Glasgow International 2024. Photo credit: Sean Patrick Campbell
Installation documentation. Glasgow International 2024. Photo credit: Sean Patrick Campbell