The title of this film comes from a conversation I had with my grandmother at the turn of the new century. We were both quite drunk at the time, having shared a bottle of wine (the sole occasion this happened in her lifetime, probably because she wasn’t being policed by my grandfather who was indisposed at her Majesty’s pleasure at the time, but that’s another story). Her tongue now unlocked, she proceeded to break a family secret. My great grandmother (not on her side, mind you) had been a gypsy, “but not the bad kind, the good kind,” were exactly the words she used. I was delighted replying, “Yes! At last, there’s finally something interesting about this family!” What a gift. In that moment, it didn’t occur to me that it had been considered so shameful a fact that it had been hidden for two generations. So this film was motivated by a search for that lost part of my genealogy, where I worked with a diverse archive, to produce an experience that reanimates and expands the social meanings of images and sounds. I began to collate materials relating to those most prepared to transgress spatial boundaries and stand up as figures against everybody being in their place. I then worked to put the images and sounds in affective proximity to one another, to frame the work in a direct manner and combine ideology critique with an uplift aesthetic. My intention was to make subtle and small aesthetic actions to try to coax into visibility the psychoanalytic postulations of rejection, exclusion, projection, and abjection inherent in subject formation whilst refuting narratives that render marginalised subjects genetically inferior, deviant, and other. I worked with these circulating images as unpredictable objects that refuse stable positioning of the public and private spheres, and collapse the binary distinctions of fiction and documentary.
