Hope Pearl Strickland: a river holds a perfect memory

This Summer, we are excited to present two films by Hope Pearl Strickland.Much like the ebb and flow of a waterway, a river holds a perfect memory (2024), overlaps archival footage with newly shot 16mm and LIDAR scans to produce a musical, rhythmic sense of time.The film meanders gently across waterways in Jamaica, through leisure activities such as rafting on the Martha Brae River and a night-time boat trip in Falmouth’s bioluminescent Lagoon.

These dulcet images are intercepted with archival footage that tracks the industrial impact upon the landscape in Northern England.

Here we witness water transformed into a resource and a reservoir constructed in Rochdale.With this work, the artist considers the interrelation of water, memory and labour, playing with techniques of refusal, drift and repetition.

For Strickland, rivers ‘…hold within them the poetics of collapsed time and diasporic memory, alongside complex flows of resource and labour extraction’.

In this film, water exposes the Industrial Revolution’s and labour migration’s effects on supposedly disparate communities.Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Touchstones, Rochdale with support from HOME, Manchester.