The Lost Works of Johan Riding

The Lost Works of Johan Riding (by Craig Burnett, Olivia Plender, and Nick Santos-Pedro), is a "research piece" in which time, place and person form a fiction that highlights the pitfalls of interpretation and the gaps between images and ideas, history and imagination. Johan Riding is a fictional film-maker whose life has been researched and archived by one Dr Roger Quallen. The piece itself consists of a florid essay by Quallen, supported by an archive that includes photographs, scripts, props, posters and correspondence that supposedly form the remaining materials of Riding’s existence. Plucked from nowhere, the layers of falsehood that surround Riding and Quallen could be dispersed in an instant, yet their physical presence in the form of a cabinet of remnants and a biographical timeline, seen in the context of a monograph, create a fortress of truth, albeit an absurd and fragile one.