Buy Prints
Commission
Fortunate is the stone which rest where its matter lies.
Jose y Gasset Ortega, 1973
Buy Prints
Commission
Fortunate is the stone which rest where its matter lies.
Jose y Gasset Ortega, 1973
Director: G O K E
Sound: Thomas Crowley
Production in association with UCL
Format: digital media
Duration: 6 mins
Year: 2024
Director’s Statement
This project began as a modest exploration of historical street furniture: a set of stone benches dotted across the St Paul’s area, their presence anonymous and unremarked. Yet, these stones were extracted from the Thames Embankment wall, a site underpinned—literally—by Victorian engineering, sanitation systems, and layers of forgotten city planning. I found myself drawn to them, not just for what they were, but for what they contained—earth and water, stillness and memory.
As I began filming, I worked through a double-diamond process—an approach borrowed from the tech world, where I once worked—which allowed me to ideate expansively before defining, and later to develop freely before distilling. This journey was not linear, but iterative and often uncertain. The core question was always this: how can the inanimate speak?
Through image, sound design, and poetic structure, the film seeks to animate what cannot move, and to hold space for what no longer speaks. We follow the benches as portals between past and present, accompanied by soundscapes built from church bells, hydrophones submerged in the Thames, and EQ’d traffic noise woven into the whip pans between locations.