What was 'abandoned' here, as if halfway, was the process of reconstruction itself.
Mark Fisher in the BFI Gallery Book
Taking as its starting point 1922 3D film The Man from M.A.R.S., Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work is part film, part rehearsal, captured using contemporary 3D video and audio technologies. Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard set about creating a contemporary adaptation of this silent film, transporting the viewer into the centre of a rehearsal capturing the actors, artists and musicians at work. Kevin Eldon (Big Train, Hot Fuzz) stars alongside Caroline Catz (Doc Martin), Terrence Hardiman (The Demon Headmaster) and the legendary Fenella Fielding (Carry On Screaming). Soundtracked by a live band led by Nick Plytas, it also features a Martian dance by comedy actors Ben Crompton, Iain Lee and Ben Moor.
With Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work , Forsyth & Pollard weren't recreating a lost object, they were constructing an impossible object, an object that didn't - and in a sense couldn't - exist, but whose existence was implied by the installation.
Mark Fisher in the BFI Gallery Book
Forsyth and Pollard’s practice revels in the grey edges of science and the idea of haunted media. Here they stage an unmissable, entertaining and immersive installation summoning an atmosphere mixing the theatricality of the stage and the illusionism of cinema. The work occupies a state between extended reality and hallucination.
Photography: James Royall
Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work was commissioned by the BFI, and was at the BFI Southbank Gallery from 8 May until 11 July 2009.
