Outside is a video essay commissioned and funded by the Barbican Visual Arts Programme, created in 2022 during lockdown in London. At a time when physical travel was restricted, watching films became a means of journeying—each screen a window to the world beyond. The work offers an experimental, essayistic response to Sergei Eisenstein’s idea that montage is the foundational principle of cinema, with a particular focus on his concept of “intellectual montage.” Through an interplay of montage techniques that evoke both continuity and rupture, Outside assembles selected shots—cinematic “quotations”—centred on the theme of travel, drawn from the canon of world art cinema. These fragments are reconfigured into new narrative constellations, enabling imagined encounters between diverse fictional characters across time and space.

Special Thanks to the Barbican.