a river holds a perfect memory (2024) 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. In the UK, archival footage tracks industrial impact upon the landscape in Northern England - as water becomes a resource and a reservoir is constructed in Rochdale.

The film considers the interrelation of water, memory and labour and plays with techniques of refusal, errantry and repetition. Through the divergent and overlapping temporalities of working across archival footage, newly shot 16mm and LIDAR scans, the film uses water to track the impact of the industrial revolution and labour migration upon supposedly disparate communities.

The original premise of ‘a river holds a perfect memory’ was based on a series of labour protests in January 2016, St Elizabeth, Jamaica that highlighted the complex, racio-colonial capitalist logics that continue to shape the use of Black River. Rivers fascinate me for a myriad of reasons: they hold within them the poetics of collapsed time and diasporic memory; alongside complex flows of resource and labour extraction. Spending time researching reservoirs and industry in the North of England and rivers with my extended family in Jamaica, the more these worlds seemed to swirl and eddy together. — Hope Strickland