Rosalind Nashashibi’s film takes us to an in-between space and time. Unfolding on a sandy seashore, the film blurs the boundaries between family & friendship structures, permeating the separation between those that constitute the group. It’s as if this environment, between land and sea, led us to a collective desire for the shore, for sharing.

Will we spend a day by the seaside?
Will we find the way to non-linearity?

Remembering a screening of Rosalind’s film at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, on a rainy summer day, and meeting Elena in Altkirch some months later while installing her exhibition Between Ears, New Colours, I didn’t make the connection, even though she seemed familiar. Interweaving temporalities and experiencing an encounter in two contexts: an introduction to non-linear time. In the film, when Rosalind says “we could potentially live in a non-linear way; yet we were born in linearity,” I begin to perceive the non-linearity of the whole.

The film is not a story because linearity is established by stories. Instead, we observe food in the kitchen, packaging, liquor bottles—the only imperative is to share. A character, Elena, who is also Elena a friend of Rosalind Nashashibi’s, who is also an artist, steers a structure-less conversation.

Instead of a story, I think of a portrait painted by Elena, You, Me, and Rosie (2019), which merges three faces in the shared space of a painting. It is also the common space of looking, like these paintings observed together with loved ones in the film. The space of a film which, as Rosalind says, may only be completed by its audience: “Where there is a joyous mood, there a comrade will appear to share a glass of wine.”

Antoine Aupetit, Richard Neyroud & Thomas Patier