wouldn’t look twice, but to me every bit of it haunts me. Over the intervening years I have reimagined the space so when I returned it was a lot greener bigger and some parts I couldn’t connect at all to how I remembered them. Back in 1997 I had an idea to make a film based on a reunion of all my school friends and colleagues, I had wanted to hypnotise them and recreate scenarios from our teen years. I did a trial run with a hypnotist on two occasions one in a group situation to see which friends could be hypnotized and one where the hypnotist asked questions with my friends individually. It didn’t really work out and there are quite a few limitations to being hypnotized. It is actually a lot freer and easier just to give someone instructions. I put off developing the work after being disappointed with the results but it was always something I wanted to revisit in some form. We Are Here is based on an Edgar Lee Masters book called Spoon River Anthology which are short poems as spoken by residents as if from the grave. I filmed residents from the West Midlands reciting their regrets, losses and guilt as if they had also come back from the dead. Every location used had some significance to me and all the stories told by the participants are universal aspects that haunt us all. The final location is a youth club that I went to as a teenager. All the participants come here to be reunited, the reunion of the dead, in chorus in harmony with their memories. The final clip is of a magpie flying out of a tree. According to superstition when you see one magpie it represents sorrow. Magpies are also known to have a compassionate side as they take part in their own grieving rituals, laying grass wreaths as a farewell to dead friends. Me: We have discussed a lot of your (our) newest work. I want to end this interview with talking about one new work that hasn’t been presented in a museum or gallery yet and that is Your Views. Me: I begun this project in 2013 and had been thinking back to an old image I had taken in the 70’s through my bedroom window at home in Birmingham. I thought I had a fantastic view, there was a motorway on stilts, blocks of flats, a football pitch, horses in a field and the town of West Bromwich looming in the distance. When the photograph was developed I was quite disappointed it all looked rather dull and distanced. I didn’t realize at the time it might have something to do with the lens on the camera and the focal length etc. I was using a very cheap throw away camera. So I returned to the idea with Your Views trying to capture how the window can be a viewfinder. But I was not interested in my views, I wanted other people and a view from every country in the world. I am nearly a third way through at the moment. These views are filmed rather than photographed. The idea is the curtains or blinds etc, are the shutter and when they are opened you get the exposure of the view. Another analogy is of curtains in a theatre/cinema being pulled back. I have set up a website where people can upload their views http:// yourviewsfilm.com. Every view is a small snapshot of someone, how they open the curtain, what background sounds there are etc. Some views have people others are unpopulated. At the beginning of each clip before the view is revealed the name of the town, city, village and country appears on the curtains. It gives the audience a brief time to imagine how that place will look. Of course rarely does the name of the place correlate with the view that appears. For instance when you think of the 18
Gillian Wearing
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