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Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies

Philosopher and heart transplant recipient Jean-Luc Nancy meditates on the history and integrity of bodies: their secrets, their touching, their annihilation and strangeness, in Phillip Warnell’s short film, Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies (20mins, 35mm).

The film presents a number of visual and literary passages, each exploring the correlate between a textual narrative by Jean-Luc Nancy, his on screen presence, a surgical organ in search of a body and an unaccounted for, displaced invertebrate at sea.

An article on Phillip Warnell's films, Outlandish and The Girl with X-ray Eyes, by Andrea Lissoni entitled: 'The Meaning of the world outside the world', features in the current issue of 'Mousse contemporary art magazine' No. 22. Feb 2010.
Mousse

South London Gallery
The UK premiere of Outlandish will take place at The South London Gallery, London on November 17th, 2010 (with a publication launch and discussion). The event will be from 7-9pm. Details to follow.
South London Gallery

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The Meaning of the World Outside the World - Feature on Phillip Warnell's films, Mousse No. 22, 2010, Andrea Lissoni

"Phillip Warnell explores a shifting world whose different planes intersect, collide, and sometimes collapse.
A world that to him is full of surprises, and to those who enter it, fascinating, and infused with hidden poetry. A world
that - though focused on phenomena that are ancient or contemporary, extra-sensory or scientific, invisible or shrouded in
darkness as they may be - above all generates figures who require no footnotes."

 

 

Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies - 35mm film, 20mins. With Jean-Luc Nancy. Photograph © phillip warnell, 2009

'A body embodies: it isn’t a tautology. It is a subject predicating its own essence.
If the soul is the body’s form, then the body is also the soul’s impenetrability.
It is the soul’s hardness, substance, entrenchment. A soul without entrenchment,
without rampart, vanishes soulless'. Strange Foreign Bodies - JL Nancy

Outlandish:Strange Foreign Bodies - FID Marseille, 2009

“Two dances echo each other, differ or connect: one is the dance of language, of some ongoing
thought incarnated in a body that is responsible for expressing it; and the other is the dance of a
mute animal moving about like some code’s figures, trapped in a transparent prison. Both dances
show in their own way the paths to a motionless odyssey.”
FID Director Jean-Pierre Rehm

 

The Girl with X-ray Eyes - 35mm film, 23 mins. Photographs: Zhenia Sveshinsky

The world of the shadowless person
"The power of science produces a sort of reaction of subjects, an almost vital
refusal to let ourselves be reduced to its algorithms. Phillip Warnell's film about
Natasha Demkina states that subjects cannot becomprehensively calculated."
Gérard Wajcman

 

Lydia Kavina plays The Girl with X-ray Eyes
Performing a live Theremin film accompaniment composed for the film by Vladimir Nikolaev,
June 2008. Photograph, Hana Vojackova