Simon Martin

‘How do you make a film of piece of furniture? How is one to set the scene? What would you show or say?’

Carlton is a short film about a bookcase, set in an empty gallery space. The bookcase was created in the 1980’s by Memphis – the design group led by the legendary Ettore Sottsass, which made a short-lived yet dynamic postmodernist assault on Modernist good sense and aesthetic conservatism.

Consisting of details and tracking shots, the film carries a female voiceover whose tone and style of delivery is reminiscent of shampoo adverts and marketing infomercials. The narration describes a brief history of Memphis and goes onto self-consciously speculate on a Postmodernist trajectory in an attempt to answer some of the questions it provokes with even more questions — the deadpan filming animated by the compressed and urgent narrative.