Below is a response of fewer than 500 words that places my work in conversation with Agnès Varda’s film The Gleaners and I and Janet Cardiff’s audio walk The Missing Voice (Case Study B):

In The Gleaners and I (2000), Agnès Varda documents people gathering leftover food and objects, and also posits herself as a gleaner of images and stories. My project similarly gathers abandoned bathroom objects, and through my interviews, memories. We also both connect discarded material to socioeconomic conditions: Varda explores corporate waste amid poverty, while I interpret objects left by former tenants through the precarity of shared renting.

However my strongest thematic connection to Varda is our shared interest in taking pleasure in the abject.

At some points, Varda shifts her focus from gleaning, to the textures of potatoes, or to her own wrinkled hands, describing the latter’s “horror” as “extraordinary” (Varda, 2000). Looking at mould on her ceiling, she remarks, “I actually like it. It’s like a landscape or an abstract painting” (Varda, 2000). Hollander describes these encounters as “enacted through a lens of pleasure and joy” (2025, p. 142).

Hollander (2025, p. 141) connects Varda’s attention to texture with Laura Marks’ haptic visuality: an intimate way of seeing that feels like touching. My macro photographs similarly invite intimate, sensory encounters with grime and bodily residue.

Bonner (2007) identifies Varda’s work as an ecofeminist revaluation of “the used, the aged, even the unsightly”. I situate my publication filth in conversation with this ecofeminist tradition through my interest in objects and bodies deemed undesirable. Take Sullivan, who is described in filth as being sprayed with faecal matter during a sexual encounter, yet celebrated for his “vivacity” and “unbridled energy” – humour, affection and desire appear in unlikely places. Like Varda, I attend to objects initially deemed repulsive, and lives that seem marginal, in ways that become compelling and pleasurable.

Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (1999) layers recorded narratives over a walk through East London. Our projects connect through process: we use encounters with physical sites to prompt stories that transform how a place is experienced.

Cardiff describes responding to a location “as if the site were a Rorschach test that I am interpreting” (1999). Similarly, presenting objects to my flatmates allowed for open-ended associations and speculation.

Cardiff constructs fictional narratives, while my interviews draw on remembered experiences, yet both allow physical surroundings to become openings into other times. Pinder, describing Cardiff interrupting the streets around Christ Church with recordings evoking war or a possible terrorist attack, observes that “the fixity of space and the linearity of time give way” (2001, pp. 10–11). Drawing on Pile, he discusses how encounters with space allow “the past, the present and the future” to be “combined and recombined” (Pile, cited in Pinder, 2001, p. 11).

My interviews similarly produced temporal shattering and recombination. My present experience of the bathroom becomes populated by events I did not witness and people I have not met. Hearing the flat’s intimate histories has tantalised my imaginings of my own life here and its erotic potential. In my shared bathroom, remembered bodily encounters mingle with present sensations and anticipated future possibilities for pleasure, intimacy and connection.

References

Bonner, V. (2007) ‘Beautiful trash: Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse’, Senses of Cinema, 45. Available at: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/feature-articles/glaneurs-et-glaneuse/ (Accessed: 11 October 2026).

Cardiff, J. (1999) ‘The Missing Voice: Case Study B’ [Artist’s statement]. Available at: https://cardiffmiller.com/walks/the-missing-voice-case-study-b/ (Accessed: 11 October 2026).

Hollander, M. (2025) ‘“Filming one hand with the other”: Agnès Varda’s ecofeminist gleaning’, Studies in Documentary Film, 19(2), pp. 135–148. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2025.2457167.

Pinder, D. (2001) ‘Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city’, Ecumene, 8(1), pp. 1–19. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44252244.

Varda, A. (dir.) (2000) Les glaneurs et la glaneuse [The Gleaners and I] [Film]. France: Ciné-Tamaris.