Jenna Collins 

Victory Monument to the Vanquishing of the Artists by the Engineers (built of text, wildly unstable and utterly unbuildable in any traditional sense) prematurely announces a victory.
Performance version, radio version and text version.



One, 2, 3
Exploiting forms and materials that traditionally get burnt up in the production of the moving image, One, 2, 3 moves through sequences and fragments of writing concerned with invention, extraction and theft.





The September Garden: Plots (2020–2021)/ We Are Publication



Modes of collage have been a central preoccupation for the artists group We Are Publication (WAP). Participants have now set out to explore whether they can cultivate an artwork that is ‘grown’ from several discreet constituents. To this end WAP has drawn on contemporary American poet Rosemarie Waldrop’s recent appellation ‘gap gardening’ to suggest that the placement of words (and plants) generates intermedial zones of transformation and potential.



Internal Dissolve (2020) commisioned by the Stanley Picker Public Lectures and Events series for the launch of the website. https://pickerpubliclectures.com/Jenna-Collins



Internal Dissolve is imagined as a tourist video of sorts. The assembled material constitutes a hot crowd containing an extract from a Pier Paolo Pasolini screenplay, tourist footage (frequently the artist’s own) and footage from people testing camera functions only to get distracted by details of the world made special by the viewfinder. The tourist is adept at being a bit bored and then engrossed by some thing or other, a speculating presence engaged in, or thinking about, the possibility and cost of further escapes.


We Are Publication: Placement does not explain, but cultivates a September garden.  (video, 2020)
Camden Art Centre, ‘Public Knowledge’ programme, 07/09/2020 - 29/11/2020

Placement does not explain… abridges the writing of contemporary American poet Rosemarie Waldrop, whose recent appellation ‘gap gardening’ refers to the productive interstices between words, and between worlds.
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Jonathan Allen, Rachel Cattle, Jenna Collins (editor) , Volker Eichelmann, John Hughes, Christian Newby, Andrea Stokes






Contribution to The Kink in the Ark by Paul Becker, 2020


The Kink in the Arc is a collective, dream novel. Invited writers, artists and curators contribute a description of an artwork in any form, these descriptions are then ‘sited’ within the context of the novel: an overheard conversation between two residents in a ‘sanatorium for the weary of image’. -  Paul Becker


t  h  e      H O L D
We Are Publication colloaboration
Stanley Picker Gallery 26 Sep - 14 Dec 2019
Upcoming Live Event: Wed 4 Dec 6-8pm










We Are the Road (2017 - 2018 (01:55 extract of 10:15)

Internal Dissolve (2018)

Text and newsprint publication that proposes making  writing under the influence of the moving image by expanding upon an extract from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s screenplay, St Paul (1977), which did not secure funding to become a film.

The image of a boat far away, small, faded in the liquid ground.  A boat that might dissolve into the sea, be ingested by it, or pass so far away that vision reaches its limit, gives in and starts improvising. This open, bright image is inhaled by the internal dissolveinstruction -the internal of the lungs (who doesn’t breathe deeply when facing the sea?) or of the inside of the film. An accident of filmic jargon in proximity (a return, not even a new paragraph) to its forecast image. The boat is then dissolved, fizzing away to nothing. It has been consumed, used up as image and idea -for these purposes at least.

What would it be to dissolve internally, or to fade? Like a night of serious drinking I imagine, but I know this is Marseille and a population of fictional sailors -unpaid extras sharing cigarettes -are pressing in.

And while writing this I am also thinking of the Marcel Broodthaers film, A Voyage on the North Sea. Another boat and sea scenario, this time already fixed. Still shots of a photograph of a small sailboat, then of a painting of a larger sailboat and details of the painting, the sails, the water, the canvas interspersed with page numbers -and then another photograph, static and clear, of a small sailboat floating in front of a city. 

And then, in brackets, a statement in the future anterior (this will have happened) scaffolds the scenario, grounding it with the mechanics of how it will have been achieved. In this case by theft, a particular sort of extraction which casts filmmaking as a process of extraction in general. The mechanics of an imagined budget leading to the mournful intuition about what it costs, in all senses, to make anything at all.






Polygraph (2015)


VHS Library (2016)

Built in 1967, Hammars was Ingmar Bergman’s home until his death in 2007 and was designed to fit his needs precisely. It is now a workspace for invited artists, owned by an anonymous Norwegian benefactor who wishes the house to remain exactly as it was when Bergman inhabited it. This involves adhering to strict rules on shoes, where conversation is permitted, and where water may be drunk. The location of the house is kept secret by the islanders - it is not a public space but a discreet component of the industry that has sprung up around his legacy.

Our induction to Hammars was a mixture of its story and its rules given by a woman whose family had long been involved with Bergman and his island buildings. She talked us through the door/key/shoe protocol and then through the rooms, pointing out where he had written in thick pen on tabletops and doors–an edit of his nightmares–small sections kept for posterity and other sections painted over. She told us about the slipping problems with the linoleum that Bergman had put in the bathroom; it struck me as very NHS. The VHS library was a mustard carpeted shelf-lined room with a couple of comfy chairs and a big TV. The rest of the bungalow was pine-panelled and low-ceilinged, there were a couple of tapestries and a meditation room. A used cotton bud had been left on his bed, presumably not Bergman’s. Photography and filming are prohibited inside but we could write, talk and plan, she said. And we were not to let anyone in the building. If curious tourists or Bergman fans came up to the window and demanded to be let in, we should tell them to fuck off.

We felt unsettled in the house. We sat in the living room; I was on a large sofa where the children had been allowed to sit. It was damp and hard through age and the sun was shining straight into my eyes. All the windows were sealed to stop the snoopers and to protect the remnants of the man, but the result was an atmosphere like a sickly sweat. The Swedes in our group talked about patriarchy in Swedish culture, they recognised what sort of a man Bergman was from what they knew of his films and life as a Swedish icon, from men they knew like him, from his wealthy background, and the nine children by different women. It wasn’t unfamiliar to us English. We left, subdued and irritable with plans to return for a closer look at his VHS collection.


 







The Grand Alliance (2016)  Quick Millions, London

The Grand Alliance is named after the consortium of Amrican companies brought together in 1993 for the purpose of developing an HDTV standard, a process as personal, political and commercial, as it was technological or aesthetic. The project responds to the libidinal, comedic and delusional impulses present in the archival material, thinking about what we attach to the promise of ever better images and how we imagine the process by which they are arrived at.

If you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.
-- Stewart Brand (1988)

Throughout April, Jenna Collins undertook a residency within the online and physical space of Quick Millions, producing an unreliable history of HDTV in the form of a screenplay and associated material. PRE-2015 (various)