A film by Delaine Le Bas & Damian James Le Bas
An Animate Projects commission supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England

animateprojects.org/films/by_date/20141/chuvihoni

Please wear headphones while watching this film to fully appreciate the audio.

CHUVIHONI looks at the places where memories live – in this case, within Britain’s Romani Gypsy culture.

The departure point was a belief that in Gypsy culture, as in others, collective memory is retained through the interrelationship of four phenomena: past places, past persons; present spaces, present persons. The challenge was to create a sense of these ‘memory spaces’ in the form of a film: a multi-disciplinary, multi-creator approach was essential in order to do justice to the nature of collective memory.

A recording of artist Delaine Le Bas in conversation with her grandmother, alongside footage by Damian James Le Bas of traditional Romani stopping places in Hampshire, formed the spine of the piece. Sound designer Tim Harrison used binaural recording techniques in past and present memory ‘sites’: the recordings were then played through speakers in a 3D environment, which could be physically walked through with microphones to add further layers to the soundscape. Animator Katerina Athanasopoulou used a combination of scans of Delaine’s artworks and family photographs to integrate animated elements into the filmed footage, creating not just an enhanced sense of the physical and historical ‘depth’ of the images, but a wholly original representation of Romani memory and place.