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July is Disability Pride Month, and we're sharing Posy Dixon's new film about Submit To Love Studios — home to a group of artists living with a brain injury (and who created the incredible artworks in the Common Threads exhibition on now at Autograph). Watch it here 🎥
Posy Dixon's new short film Chaos/Quest is an outcome of her residency with the artists at Headway East London's Submit To Love Studios. Dixon discusses the inspiration for the film: "The idea for this film stemmed from the book The Wounded Storyteller by Arthur W. Frank. This is a book that Submit To Love Studios artist Chris Miller shared with me, when I asked for advice on an entry level academic text to read about the politics surrounding health in contemporary British society.
Frank talks of storytelling as a tool for a person who has suffered trauma and lost the ‘destination and map’ that previously governed their lives. To create a new ‘destination and map’ a person must tell stories and share those stories with others, in order to build new structures of meaning and identity.
Throughout the book, Frank categorises several types of storytelling connected to illness in our society, only two of which are told by the wounded themselves: ‘Chaos Narratives’ and ‘Quest Narratives’. Frank describes Chaos Narratives as anxiety inducing stories of lived chaos, which consume the person living that experience rendering words and storytelling useless. In contrast, Quest Narratives are where suffering is met head on; the teller accepts illness and seeks to use it.
In the words of Frank: 'Illness is the occasion of a journey that becomes a quest. What is quested for may never be wholly clear, but the quest is defined by the ill person’s belief that something is to be gained through the experience.'
These ideas resonated with my learning from spending time with the artists at Submit to Love. The art studio and their practice seems (from my understanding) to offer a pathway from chaos to quest. From trauma to clarity."
Inspired by the artists' lived experience of brain injury, see new textile works exploring ideas of heritage, talent and otherness. Until 14 August 2021 at Autograph's London gallery.
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See Leon Foggitt's portraits, making visible artists who are frequently overlooked in galleries and art spaces.
Read more 
is a London-based producer and director. She's worked for Vice London and was the executive producer at the music video production company Colonel Blimp before co-founding the documentary and audio-visual production company Luca in 2014. She has made films for media companies such as Channel 4, BBC Worldwide, Vogue and Wired as well as for commercial clients. An obsession with a cult record led to her first feature Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story.
Visit Dixon's website and find out more about Luca Productions.
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Chaos / Quest is directed by Posy Dixon. © LUCA Productions Ltd
Banner image: Film still from Chaos/Quest
Page images, from top: 1) Brian Searle, Unidentified Sitter [detail], 2020. Courtesy Submit to Love Studios / Headway East London. 2) Yoki Mekuria by Leon Foggitt [detail], 2020. Courtesy Submit to Love Studios / Headway East London / Leon Foggitt.
Autograph is a place to see things differently. Since 1988, we have championed photography that explores issues of race, identity, representation, human rights and social justice, sharing how photographs reflect lived experiences and shape our understanding of ourselves and others.
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