Walking on Letters

The film Walking On Letters (10 minutes) by Shona Illingworth was informed by work with people on probation undertaken through performance and visual art based socially engaged projects over a five-year period working with Insight Arts Trust. The film draws on an extensive archive of recordings made over an 18 month period of an ex-offender who had spent long periods of time in prison. Walking on Letters is a moving image and sound composition which explores the affect imprisonment has on memory and a sense of self, the critical necessity of the imagination to survive the intensity of a confined and resolute physical space and the strategies for coping with long periods of incarceration. In a series of performative actions, the film goes through a series of constrants and affective registers as the deeper memory of space is unwound to reveal the repetative action of attempting to sensitise the soles of the feet to read letters by walking on them in the dark each night.