Fossil
2019
4K 4:3, 22 mins, surround sound

Performers: Anton Skrzypiciel and Romeu Runa
Director of photography: Mário Melo Costa
Production: Anže Peršin, Stenar Projects
Sound recording: Bernardo Theriaga
Soundtrack and mix: Jon Smeathers
Production assistant: Elise Paixão
This project was commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the exhibition, The National 2019: New Australian Art.
This project was assisted through Arts Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts.
This project was supported by the Centro Cultural Carpintarias de São Lázaro, Lisbon.

James Newitt’s video work Fossil (2019) began life as a book written by the artist in late 2017. Before it implicated image and sound and rhythm and pace in the unravelling of its narrative, it was just text on a page. But that’s entirely appropriate, poetically prophetic even. For this work is about language: language as a navigational device and a life raft […]

In the film, this ruptured relationship – this grasping at the edge of intimacy – morphs into a physical struggle between two men, one older than the other. Aggressive but also affectionate, there is a co-dependency here but we’re never sure if (or how) the two are related. As with the book, form remains fragmentary, meaning remains elusive; a voiceover sidesteps its subject.

(extract from text by Isobel Parker Philip).