Uploaded June 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
In one of the opening scenes of The Sun Has No Shadow a modulated voice suggests that: “the openness to exteriority and its influences is an essential characteristic of another feature of the modernist inheritance and that is to reveal the Other within oneself, to become Other.” Under the gaze of experimental filmmaker and video artist Rebecca Salvadori, refurbished factories and warehouses, industrial parks, dimly-lit underpasses and motorway-adjacent woodlands are produced not only as hedonistic spaces, the as yet undeveloped real estate upon which London’s clubs and free parties can find an all too often temporary home, but as liminal sites of transformative potential, in which one is suspended in fleeting moments of intimacy and communal connection. Cutting between non-linear documentary and abstract montage in a dissociative assemblage of image, sound and text, The Sun Has No Shadow navigates a vital shared territory between the moving image and live sound and performance, splicing footage from Canning Town institution FOLD and its beloved Sunday day rave UNFOLD next to testimonials from ecstatic ravers and Salvadori’s own friends. “I have always been drawn towards environments and situations that felt transitional, open, not fully finished,” explains Salvadori. “I believe it might be because these contexts allow you to exist in a less mechanical way. They are more layered and have a space of possibility within them. When an area has been conceived for a specific need, everything feels more compressed and mechanical. The edges of a city are spaces in-between, areas where the intentionality of urbanisation becomes transitional and almost left to itself.”
In this way FOLD, perched on the edge of an E16 industrial estate, takes on the wild aura of the “edgelands,” seperate from the relentlessness of the city and tinged with the transient energy of wilderness, charged with transformative potential. In the excerpt of Salvadori’s film presented above, the filmmaker’s passage through these liminal environments serves as both a record of navigating the complexity of London’s outer reaches and a prescient diagnosis of a contemporary condition. Flashes of hi-vis trousers illuminate the ghosts of the second summer of love haunting Salvadori’s frame, mapping the distance between London’s rave scenes past and present. Loops of night vision footage of Salvadori’s friends at an after party repeat as an unseen speaker narrates the experience of watching themselves on screen, the visual repetitions taking on the constant rhythm of a four on the floor beat. These vignettes, displaced form discernable space and time, seem to wrestle with the psychic difficulty presented by the commercial and corporate intensities of urban life, parsing the tension between a desire for and an assumed need of various kinds of dissociation, be they emotional, political or narcotic. These liminal spaces present an opportunity for escape from the city, but whether this is an escape from an overwhelming network of automation and commodification or an escape into a DIY formation of community is left intentionally vague by the filmmaker, an inscrutability emphasised by facial blur, voice modulation and detached subtitles. “Sometime ago I received a message from someone I don’t know,” Salvadori recalls. They said: In your work everything happens in its exact own time, I felt I was not watching a video, just being in myself, part of a continuous life of something. It was a really weird feeling.”
For more information about Rebecca Salvadori and her work you can follow her on Instagram.
In one of the opening scenes of The Sun Has No Shadow a modulated voice suggests that: “the openness to exteriority and its influences is an essential characteristic of another feature of the modernist inheritance and that is to reveal the Other within oneself, to become Other.” Under the gaze of experimental filmmaker and video artist Rebecca Salvadori, refurbished factories and warehouses, industrial parks, dimly-lit underpasses and motorway-adjacent woodlands are produced not only as hedonistic spaces, the as yet undeveloped real estate upon which London’s clubs and free parties can find an all too often temporary home, but as liminal sites of transformative potential, in which one is suspended in fleeting moments of intimacy and communal connection. Cutting between non-linear documentary and abstract montage in a dissociative assemblage of image, sound and text, The Sun Has No Shadow navigates a vital shared territory between the moving image and live sound and performance, splicing footage from Canning Town institution FOLD and its beloved Sunday day rave UNFOLD next to testimonials from ecstatic ravers and Salvadori’s own friends. “I have always been drawn towards environments and situations that felt transitional, open, not fully finished,” explains Salvadori. “I believe it might be because these contexts allow you to exist in a less mechanical way. They are more layered and have a space of possibility within them. When an area has been conceived for a specific need, everything feels more compressed and mechanical. The edges of a city are spaces in-between, areas where the intentionality of urbanisation becomes transitional and almost left to itself.”
In this way FOLD, perched on the edge of an E16 industrial estate, takes on the wild aura of the “edgelands,” seperate from the relentlessness of the city and tinged with the transient energy of wilderness, charged with transformative potential. In the excerpt of Salvadori’s film presented above, the filmmaker’s passage through these liminal environments serves as both a record of navigating the complexity of London’s outer reaches and a prescient diagnosis of a contemporary condition. Flashes of hi-vis trousers illuminate the ghosts of the second summer of love haunting Salvadori’s frame, mapping the distance between London’s rave scenes past and present. Loops of night vision footage of Salvadori’s friends at an after party repeat as an unseen speaker narrates the experience of watching themselves on screen, the visual repetitions taking on the constant rhythm of a four on the floor beat. These vignettes, displaced form discernable space and time, seem to wrestle with the psychic difficulty presented by the commercial and corporate intensities of urban life, parsing the tension between a desire for and an assumed need of various kinds of dissociation, be they emotional, political or narcotic. These liminal spaces present an opportunity for escape from the city, but whether this is an escape from an overwhelming network of automation and commodification or an escape into a DIY formation of community is left intentionally vague by the filmmaker, an inscrutability emphasised by facial blur, voice modulation and detached subtitles. “Sometime ago I received a message from someone I don’t know,” Salvadori recalls. They said: In your work everything happens in its exact own time, I felt I was not watching a video, just being in myself, part of a continuous life of something. It was a really weird feeling.”
For more information about Rebecca Salvadori and her work you can follow her on Instagram.
