Something Happened
Tamworth Central, Tamworth, ON
August 2024
Full online catalog of residency structure here.

Something Happened is the culminating exhibition of an artist residency platform of the same name, which took place at Tamworth Central throughout July. The project’s design, developed by artist-curator Neven Lochhead, was initiated and commissioned through Malini Guha’s SSHRC-funded research project “On Traction: Moving Images and Their Realities,” which is returning to a longstanding relationship between cinema and reality. The Something Happened residency used sound, video, and writing to question the idea of ‘retreat’ and ‘reflection’ that are common in artist residency programming structures, re-tuning situated artistic activity for a more determinate set of attitudes. Its invited group participants developed and expanded the shared avatars of The Investigator and The MacGuffin through week-long stays in Tamworth. Through sound workshops in the barn, material research in and around the area, the shooting of a film, and critical writing processes of lateral influence between participants emerged that gradually thickened the program’s persistent narrative pressure: Everything had already taken place. What was left to do was lead back to the cause.

During her stay in Tamworth, filmmaker Bojana Babic turned the residency platform inside out. The strangeness of being an uninvited guest in the village, charged with unveiling an unspoken reality in the locale, motivated a process of improvised character development, which she captures here on camera. In and around Tamworth, Babic prompts curator Neven Lochhead, re-cast here in the role of The Investigator, to carry out absurdist dramatizations of processes of inquiry. Curious, aimless, itinerant, but proceeding with the determined certainty that there is something there, Babic’s quasi-noir film creates a refractive instrument through which to see, hear, and activate the environment, from a safe and alien distance.

The immersive material research methods of multidisciplinary artist Noah Scheinman found resonance with the collection of machinery offcuts and infrastructural castaways that populate the Tamworth Central Barn. These are the raw materials that motivate the design practice of Carolyn Butts, owner of Tamworth Central, which become borrowed here by Scheinman in the production of an array of sculptural gestures. In dialogue with the village and surrounding landscape, the artist creates a taxonomy of forms, divided across three groups – tools, dwellings, and monuments – which translate into minimalist object compositions resting on the barn floor. Scheinman’s process of sorting, summation, and synthesis results in a legend of sorts to an oblique cartography. These forms to navigate with, from the barn back out to the habitat.

Bookending the investigations of Babic and Scheinman were two writing intensives in Tamworth by film scholar Malini Guha. In her resulting text, “Loops and Liberation (Between two Banks),” included in the final exhibition, Guha writes from a proximity to experimental practice, as a scholar embedded closely in the artistic research methods of Something Happened. The opening line of her essay, “I wanted to pick up a camera,” recounting an affecting moment while standing at the Salmon River, becomes a point of departure for Guha to consider how a disciplinary transformation of film studies could more adequately attend to the relationship between cinema and reality. Guha’s collection of notes builds a speculative argument that seeks to comprehend the idea of cinema as a tension between traction and flight, while leaving us on a perpetual cliffhanger.