Weaving Memory: A Conversation

Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn, On Weaving (still), 2025. Courtesy of Luke Fowler, Corin Sworn, and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival.

On October 16, 2025, e-flux Screening Room presented “Weaving Memory,” a program of four recent films by Luke Fowler: On Weaving (2025, with Corin Sworn), N’importe Quoi (for Brunhild) (2023), N’importe Quoi (Extérieur – Jour) (2024), and Patrick (2020).1  The screening was followed by a conversation between the artist, Lukas Brasiskis, and the audience. The transcript of this conversation was edited for the present publication.

Question: The four films we watched today make it clear that you’re not interested in biographical documentary that attempts to reconstruct a life story in a linear way. Instead, you build open portraits from fragments—spaces people lived in, sounds, traces, atmospheres. Your approach brings to mind Gilles Deleuze’s idea that everything starts in the middle: your films often drop us straight into someone’s world and let us find our own way through it. Was this way of working already present in your early films, or did it develop gradually as you went along? How did you come to this way of making film portraits?

Luke Fowler: The very first moving-image works I made were actually video pieces rather than film portraits. One early project was an exhibition at Transmission Gallery in Glasgow called “The Social Engineer,” where I invited people from very different backgrounds and professions—unemployed artists, performance artists, people who worked for Strathclyde Police, even the governor of Barlinnie Prison—to have conversations with each other. They didn’t know who they were going to meet beforehand. They were just thrown into this situation, a bit like a blind date, and I liked the creative tension of that, a friction that could generate an interesting dialogue.

At that time I was really into electronic music—people like Coil and Scanner, who used phone sounds and voices in their music. I gave these recorded conversations to different electronic musicians to remix. What I noticed was that they didn’t have much concern for “truth” in a documentary sense. They would sample little bits, throw away most of the material, and do whatever they wanted aesthetically with it.

That was my first experiment with video. After that I decided to make a film that was more what one might call a “history” project about a place, Kingsley Hall. It was a social experiment set up by R. D. Laing and the Philadelphia Association, an attempt to create an alternative to the mental hospital, a bit like Félix Guattari’s projects with La Borde Clinic. It was quite successful for the time that it lasted, and the Philadelphia Association still continues today, though in a more sanitized way. Even then I wasn’t particularly interested in making a film that was a hagiography of R. D. Laing. I was interested in the conditions of the experiment: What happens when you set up these safe, island-like, utopic projects; when you create what Laing called an “epistemological anarchy”?

The film about Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra, Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006), was similar. It was about a whole community of musicians and nonmusicians, and it challenged the hierarchy of who gets to be a “high art” composer. In a conventional orchestra, the musician has a very servile, passive role. They’re not meant to interpret the music; they’re meant to do what they’re told, follow the score, and read notes fluently. Cardew asked: What do we do with people who can’t read music, who can’t necessarily play traditional instruments, but who are still creative and want to make actions and happenings and performances? That’s where Cardew’s score The Great Learning (1968–71) comes in, drawing on the writings of Confucius.

Those were my first film projects. Only slowly did things start to coalesce into films that are more obviously portraits. Electro-Pythagoras (2017), the film about Martin Bartlett, was probably the first where I really tried to deal with somebody’s life through an archive and to represent a segment of that life. The script comes from his correspondence—letters that had been saved to an old floppy disc. We managed to retrieve them and I edited them and had Martin’s old friend; the curator Scott Watson read them out.

Question: You mentioned Guattari and the movement of institutional psychotherapy that focused on the idea of a collective body freed from usual hierarchies, and I thought about your own practice in those terms too. You work with collaborators—composers, musicians, other artists—and your films often feel very “collective” in how they’re made. How did you come up with your own way of making films? 

LF: I don’t know if one can tell from my films, but I never went to film school. I’m an autodidact filmmaker, in the same way that the Scratch Orchestra were nonmusicians. I’m a nonmusician and a nonfilmmaker who ended up making films. Trained as an artist—actually as a printmaker—I came to film through video art and was learning simply through watching other people’s films.

When I was growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s and 1990s, Channel 4 started, and it was really important. They set up what was called the Workshop Act, which enabled and empowered marginalized groups to make their own films. Black Audio Film Collective, Berwick Street Collective, Cinema Action, Amber Films, various feminist film groups—many of them made films that were then shown on television. If you were fortunate, you caught those late at night. They also showed Kenneth Anger and a lot of experimental films; actually, filmmakers like Patrick Keiller had their first films shown or commissioned by Channel 4. So even something as institutional as state television could expose you to quite unusual, experimental work at that time. All of that shaped me. I saw that film could be made in many different ways.

Question: I’d like to ask more about the archive. I was thinking of Disordered Attention, a recent book by Claire Bishop, where she’s quite critical of the research driven contemporary art.2 Very often in those art projects, as she diagnoses, the archive becomes a kind of positivist reservoir of facts that the artist simply organizes into a story. Many of your films depend on archival research, but the archive in your work feels more like a character than a defined object: something unstable, partial, even resistant. How do you approach archival research?

LF: Things have changed a lot since I first started working with archival material. Today most archives operate as commercial entities. Licensing footage has become much more expensive and much more complicated. With the spread of the internet—and now with image-recognition and AI—copyright is a minefield for artists.

There are artists like Terre Thaemlitz, DJ Sprinkles, who tell their fans not to put their music up on YouTube because they will then get cease –and desists from people they sampled. It really is a shit time to be working with archival material, because people are very protective and don’t see it as a creative, liberatory exercise.

So a lot of the archives I work with are more like fugitive archives—things that aren’t in Getty, for example. And where I have worked with institutional archives, it’s usually been through an invitation to work with a very specific archive. Clearing archival material is an art form; it’s an art of persuasion…

Question: Following on from that: we talked about how your films do not comply with the logic of expository, linear storytelling. How much do the archival findings shape final forms of your films? Do you know, before you start the archival research, what a film will look like, or does its final form and structure depend on what you find in the archive?

LF: It’s much more about discovery within the material than about illustrating a biography I’ve already read. If you take the film on Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra, Pilgrimage from Scattered Points, and compare it to John Tilbury’s book on Cardew, they perform completely different functions.3 One doesn’t replace the other. I’d like to think of them as complementary.

For example, the Martin Bartlett film, it came from a special collection that had gathered his slides, photographs, letters and documents. We had to go up and back quite a lot to the place where they were held, which is Simon Fraser University on Burnaby Mountain in Vancouver, and film all the material there. Then, for example, a film like Mum’s Cards (2018) is all made from my mother’s archive of index cards. I’m also asking what an archive is, and I’d like to think I’m being critical as well about how we interact with archives.

Question: The majority of your films are about people who passed away, and then of course the archival materials, the places, all the material traces of their lives become what you work with, so I am curious does working with a living subject change your way of making the film? 

LF: Actually, the first film I made with somebody who was still alive was Bogman Palmjaguar (2008), and I felt a great duty of care in how he was represented within the film. I felt similarly with Brunhild, but I think Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari’s personality really comes out in that film. She exudes warmth and openness and affection, which I think really changes the timbre of the work.

I think Patrick could be mentioned here, even though Patrick Cowley himself died in the early 1980s. Patrick’s energy really exudes into the grain of the film; it feels inscribed within it, even though I don’t know whether he ever went up to Marin County and the Marin Headlands. A lot of the film is shot there, and some of it is filmed in the botanical gardens in Berkeley, so it’s very much speculative, but I feel like his spirit comes out in the film…

Question: Talking about Patrick, the film is about Patrick Cowley as a musician, but it also gestures toward a broader history: San Francisco’s gay and queer communities, the club scene around South of Market, and the AIDS crisis. Could you talk about how the film began for you?

LF: I think a lot of it comes from when we were going out to clubs—acid house, house music, techno. Particularly in Scotland, it was quite white and straight and male at one point, and disco was seen as this thing associated with the Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever (1977). It was considered cheesy and had already been kind of whitewashed—the history of disco by that point.

The more I started researching the history of disco music, the more I understood that it was really this kind of church, a safe place for Black, Latino, and queer communities. The origins of so much contemporary dance music come from there. A lot of people maybe think it starts with Kraftwerk or Giorgio Moroder, and that removes a lot of the queer history of dance music.

I wanted to celebrate, or at least pay attention to, the fact that so many of those figures were part of the queer community—so many of those heroic, legendary figures like Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, Walter Gibbons, Arthur Russell, Patrick, and others. The club was their church: a safe place where they wouldn’t be, or were less likely to be, arrested or incriminated.

So that was the start. But it also came from being at the residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. If Dark Entries hadn’t reissued and rediscovered a lot of Patrick’s music—especially the gay porn soundtracks—and if I hadn’t heard how great they are, the film probably wouldn’t exist. It just came from meeting Josh, talking to him, and him being quite responsive to the idea.

Question: Sound seems central across all four films. Especially with Patrick, there’s a strong sense of disjunction: sounds and images don’t line up in a literal way. Could you talk a bit about your use of sound—how much of it comes out of experimental film traditions, and how much from ideas of acousmatic sound or musique concrète?

LF: Indeed sound is central to my practice and I have often worked collaboratively with sound artists, composers and field recordists over the year. I very rarely—if at all use sync sound and am much more interested in notions of sound montage. One of the first films I really loved that uses disjunctive sound is (nostalgia) by Hollis Frampton (1971), where the image, the photograph, and the text are not synchronized. Acousmatic music privileges the texture and autonomy of sound for itself, rather than the received meaning or its historic context. So I’m thinking a lot about sound–image connections and how they resonate through the edit. I’m really trying to get away from the literalness between sound and image, where they form a single unit of understanding. And then of course music becomes a whole other layer on top of that as well…

Question: I guess that also relates to what was discussed earlier about your films not being biographical. The sound design reinforces that: it’s not linear storytelling, and the sound doesn’t always follow the image in a linear way either.

LF: Yes, absolutely. Aki Onda once said about my films that the filming is very musical, while the sound is very cinematic. I liked that.

Question:  Along those lines, I was curious if you could talk about a few moments in On Weaving and also in Patrick where the images are sped up. I’m interested in this idea of different kinds of time in the image and was thinking that maybe there’s an element of weaving in those temporalities there. Also in relation to being alive and not being alive, and how does someone apprehend that?

LF: Yes, I was thinking about that as well. There’s a sense of polytemporality that runs through a lot of my films. There are many ways of dealing with death and legacies—what somebody leaves behind and how they live on through it: their physical legacy in terms of materials, music, art, writings, but also the relationships they’ve had with people, how they’ve touched people.

For me, you can really feel the reverberation between Luc and Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari, or between Maurice (Tani) and Patrick. It was quite tangible.

I’m also thinking about the resonance between a place and the people who live in it now. For example, in our film On Weaving, how High Sunderland has this history and legacy that the current owners respect without ever having met Bernat Klein or the architect Peter Womersley, just through observing the intentions of the architect and client. Quite often, the tendency is when we move into a house or space to personalize it—we try to eradicate the previous owners’ footprint. In this case, it’s the opposite. 

Or, take, Being Blue (2025), my film about Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. Living there was uncanny, because the space was left so intact—that it was as if Derek and Keith had just gone out for a walk and left everything in progress: Derek’s paints, his cassettes of music, his boots and jacket, his shopping bag. The whole house smelled of linseed oil. It was really quite magical.

Question: You mentioned Frampton and (nostalgia), and I couldn’t help thinking of another experimental filmmaker, Robert Beavers, particularly in relation to what we’ve been discussing about sound and image having their own independent existence but forming a whole. In some of his early films the camera and the operator are very organically included in the shot, so the whole becomes not just “the scene” and “who is filming,” but everything together: the filmmaker, the camera, the space, the archives… Was Robert Beavers an important figure for you?

LF: Robert Beavers is certainly an important inspiration, as is Marie Menken and Jonas Mekas. All of them shot extensively with the Bolex camera. Mekas shot and often didn’t record sound, sometimes you hear him singing, or music taped off an LP or the radio. It’s the same with somebody like Margaret Tait. Because of the nature of the material and the equipment, everything was often put together from instructions sent to a lab, because someone like Margaret didn’t have the facilities in Orkney to mix all the elements: atmosphere, music and voice together. She would have sent a dubbing chart and got the lab to do it for her.

I’ve worked with Robert a number of times. We did a masterclass together called The Voice in Film. I actually found a quote that we used for the introduction, which I think would be quite appropriate to read. It says: “…while thinking about the poetics of film, Valéry comments that poetry is a ‘language within a language.’ The image and sound are brought to life through the measured interval; it’s a process that begins in filming and extends through the editing. The sense of voice that film possesses is essential.” Within my films I’m always thinking about what the voice of the film is, and whose voice it is. So you have this role as a caretaker, really—a custodian of an archive, with a responsibility, almost like writing a letter to someone.

Question: You began working on video and then moved to 16mm at a time when many filmmakers, say Mekas, were doing the reverse—moving from film to video or digital. Do you see analog film as the medium you want to stay with?

LF: You become wed to your camera, it becomes like your instrument, you know. The idea of moving to a different instrument and learning it at my age is kind of daunting. I see it as a bit like going from acoustic to electric guitar, or from an analog to a digital synthesizer. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using either; they both have their place and having limitations can often be very useful.

Somebody like Thomas Ankersmit, who uses a very particular type of modular synthesizer (Serge), rejects—for himself—other analog synths like the Moog or EMS systems because ironically, he sees them as too warm. And it’s perhaps similar with someone like Peter Rehberg, who was famous for using a laptop and then moved over to use an analog modular. I guess it is just a different way of interacting with your instrument.

With computers and digital cameras there are endless options—you could scroll for days through menus and plug-ins—and I just can’t be bothered with that. I like the simplicity of sending the film to the lab and when it comes back it’s always so exciting to watch the results.

However, not all of my films exist as 16mm prints, because it’s quite expensive to produce them. It has become more and more artisanal as I’ve gotten older. 16mm is not used educationally anymore; it used to be used in film classes, in schools and libraries and in the military. It was also the medium of choice for home-movies. Now it’s actually cheaper for me to make a 35mm print than a 16mm one…