In Lovely Blue is a kind of plague travelogue about living (and dying) under the cloud. Commissioned for the group show 'Dwelling on the Cloud' it's a very (im)personal video, partly composed of holiday clips and messing about, but heavily captioned and superimposed on by a stack of concerns that all land on the film's protagonists at once at a pivotal moment in the geopolitical and economic fortunes of the UK: October 2022. The original blurb went like this:

Frances Kruk already said it: 'I ordered a hurricane and I am still on this island.'

2 or 3 things I know about clouds and power in October 2022.

Shot in Greece and UK, this is a sketchy meditation on the blue of the heavens, the systematic confusionism and terror under which we live, dead auteurs and whited out retail windows as the economy shifts into a new kind of (post-covid) ‘death spiral’.

Holderlin wanted to run away from Germany to Greece but only got as far as France. He realised it was more Greek than Greece itself, and stayed put. We ran away to Greece but found it occupied by an army of cops and Californian algorithms; kind of the UK but more so, and first.

Wikipedia kept us informed and (in)sane but this was no garden of Eden. More an Airbnb compound by the sea where we researched Abraham and Sarah and the Old Testament of everyday life – call it ‘contracting social reproduction’.

The impossibility of travel under the cloud brought us back home, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, to make an unanswered phone call about a mad woman in my ends – my successfully failed attempt to 'help' her. She does not appear in the film but you can still hear the ‘holding’ music. We were and are all on hold until such time as the cloud consumes the telephone & its proletariat completely, or another kind of call can be made?

With the completion of the Tory-Labour merger, the sky falling on our heads (the hurricane you ordered...), negatives double or quadruple. But we’re not all volk, right?

Thanks to my collaborator, Xiaojuan Zhang, and to Danny Hayward for added inspo.

JLG: RIP.  Isou, IOU.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38453