The Last Seaport
- !6mm film
- dual projection (live)
- colour, 2025

Music: Ophir, by Ora Clementi https://blacktruffle.bandcamp.com/album/sylva-sylvarum-2

Shown as 16mm dual projection on 24 January, 2025 at Composite Moving Image, Brunswick Mechanics Institute, Melbourne (AU).

Part of 'Finite Eyes' presented with the curatorial vision of Anorak.
Supported by Creative Australia.

From the Programme:
A sea port that sits liminally between hope and uncertainty. The two channel 16mm film piece finds a heterotopian quality due to an anachronistic and mirroring approach. The piece collapses Woodnutt’s previous films and her unused film negatives into a new liminality between her body of works. In doing so a mysterious new ‘topia is found at the sea’s edge.



I was invited by Ora Clementi and Anorak from Berlin to make a live 16mm projection piece for a double sided screen, of which the audience could see the projections when seated on both sides. The evening included music by Ora Clementi and a screening program and curatorial framework by Anorak.

The evening was curated to consider the 'emotional pull and motivational force' of utopias. I saw this particularly relevant in the political climate of opposing visions for nationhood and peace, however these larger socio-political notions are also human drives found in love and longing.

I understand utopias to be futile or mythic, and harbour danger in delusion if gone too far. Yet some utopian visions have a poetic reaching toward a sublime that can be enchanting. I am far more drawn to 'heterotopias' a premise grounded in reality (or worldliness) more than utopias. Heterotopia as a theoretical framework was put forward by Foucault whereby (quite simply) an 'other space' is found to exist in our world as a mirror of society yet simultaneously forms a world of its own - such as a theatre, a prison, a library, or a ship at sea.

The music of Ora Clementi is used for the film, I found a track on their album Sylva Sylvarum called 'Ophir'. In its etymology, Ophir is a biblical region or port city that was rich in gold and especially fruitful. The exact location of Ophir is unknown. In response to the prompt of Utopia, I then imagined Ophir to have a seaport, one where new arrivals are suddenly between uncertainty and hope on its unfamiliar shores; a resting place for the lost and stranded; comprising of the displaced characters and discarded scenes from my other films. This place is called The Last Seaport of Limerence and similar to René Daumal's Mount Analogue, it can only be seen by those who seek it. The film's objective is to leave Ophir. Sailing out and away from its mythical riches, The Last Seaport of Limerence is en route to the sublime. Our time with the seaport here is seen in fragmented glimpses of something romantic yet unreal, obscured yet familiar.