You want to come and to leave richer (2024) and It shuddered deeply and everything fixed-or-stable trembled in it (2023) are two moving-image elements of a larger series of works, Prosper despite a sense of crisis, that also includes a body of photographs and lyric writing. 

 

You want to come and to leave richer (2024) was shot over two months in wellness resorts and yoga retreats across Bali and adjacent islands, and mixes this footage with a lyric text and a soundtrack combining generic yoga music and samples from Kanye West’s Black Skinhead (2013). As the text and voice speak to both modes of cultural appropriation and overtly masculine expressions of desire and power, so the actual visual form of the film recreates the cyclical structure of the pantoum, a traditional Malay verse form appropriated into the western canon, notably by Charles Baudelaire. 

 

It shuddered deeply and everything fixed-or-stable trembled in it (2023) collates footage of property developments – mostly new wellness centres and luxury condos – and of the workers on these developments, all of which were adjacent to the locations present in You want to come and to leave richer. It brings this footage into dialogue with an original soundtrack, composed from the ambient audio captured whilst filming in yoga shalas and wellness centres, and with a ‘found text’ constructed from marketing materials for the property developments and wellness centres on the island.