Poet: Michelle Elrick

expect something and nothing at once by Michelle Elrick

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A film by Canadian poet Michelle Elrick and photographer Tyler Funk based on a poem-performance installation. The description on Vimeo explains it best:

This film is part of the larger project Notes from the Fort: a poetic of inhabited space, which is a series of performance installations that create intimate places in unfamiliar environments through the play-act of fort building. Using only existing structures and a suitcase full of hand-crafted materials, each fort is constructed, inhabited, noted and dismantled in a live poetic document of sense of place and the origins of home. Notes From the Fort was under way in Reykjavík, Iceland from July-August 2012, then moved to Winnipeg, Canada from September-November 2012. The soundscape that underlies the film was made from sounds collected from the poet/director’s ancestral homes of Austria and Scotland, as well as sounds collected during the implementation of the project in Reykjavík. The poem “expect something and nothing at once” is an imagistic retelling of the poet’s personal sense of home, focusing briefly on a series of bright, vivid images that carry the listener within the walls of the fort and of the poem itself.

For more, visit the Notes from the Fort website. The film was awarded Best Cinematography at the 2013 Suffolk International Film Festival.