Taking as its point of departure an abandoned house that can be found by the marshes near the English coast, Vacant Possession is a fantasy documentary exploring love, landscape, ownership, property, power, and decay. Through poetry, experimental sound design, photography, animated collage, and onsite ritual performance, Vacant Possession freely associates upon the house, its contents, and their fate as they slowly slip into the marshes. Vacant Possession draws on traditions including the film essay and esoteric cinema to critically examine the theatrical character of much contemporary documentary making. While providing materials for a poetics of the house at the end of human life on earth, Vacant Possession also has a political commitment that brings to light how archaic laws can dispossess the dead.
Director Statement
Jackie Montague and John Bowers are a new film-making partnership colliding their histories as, respectively, writer and musician. Their work is grounded in particular sites, often in their native East of England, which are explored to probe questions of psychogeography and deep history. In their film making, sites and landscapes are still alive with past traumas and joys, feelings and passions, and unfulfilled futures. Listening to the ghosts, Montague and Bowers create alternative myths and speculations which juxtapose concerns often taken to be separate: popular culture and philosophical curiosity, the esoteric and the everyday, the elegant and the ugly, the chaotic and the formal. Following an associative method to weave multiple materials and actions, they make films which combine documentary, animation, poetry, photography, field recording, onsite ritual performance, music and experimental sound design into a film essay form that sits outside standard genres. Vacant Possession (2025) is their debut. Reflecting on an abandoned house by the marshes near the east coast of England, Montague and Bowers document a tangle of love, landscape, property, power, and decay.
Jackie is a spoken word poet, writer, performer and filmmaker based in Ipswich, UK. She sees the extraordinary in the ordinary and her work often dives headlong into an interrogation of how the cultural, political, historical and personal meet.
Jackie has been published by Earth Island Books in the 10 Poets Anthology. Her collection of poetic works : Strawberries And The Cream will be published by BrainWaves Are Better Than Perms in 2025. Live recent performances include collaborations with Hugh Metcalfe at 100 Years Gallery London and Klinker Club Café Oto London
John Bowers is an improvising experimental musician who works with modular synthesizers, home-brew electronics, self-made software, and field recordings. He has performed at festivals including the collateral programme of the Venice Biennale, Experimental Intermedia New York, Transmediale/CTM Vorspiel Berlin, Piksel Bergen, and toured with the Rambert Dance Company performing David Tudor’s music to Merce Cunningham’s Rainforest. His most recent solo album is at https://unlanded.bandcamp.com/album/unlanded-volume-1
Pebbles Underground is focused on showcasing and promoting experimental, avant-garde, underground, and no-to-low budget projects by artist-humans from all over the world. Absurd, uncanny, witty, humorous, slow-video – all are welcomed, and loved.
Pebbles Underground is an independent project not funded by any government or corporation, and we intend to keep it that way. Main source of funding is personal donations from humans organizing the project, who are artists themselves, and the main drive of the project is formed by the energy and involvement of the organizers, and the public.
