Plain Sight
Plain Sight is a series of four short films that explore public perceptions of CSA survivors.
Created through a collaborative process with 25 CSA survivors, the work reflects the embodied experience of survival, disrupts dominant narratives and sings with hope for a different future.
The series confronts pathologising systems and holds space for anger, complexity, pain and hope.
Written and performed by Viv Gordon.
Developed in collaboration with Fluxx Films and Dr Alison McKinlay from the Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at University College London.
Funded by the Violence, Abuse and Mental Health Network.
Plain Sight Films
Alive
‘Alive’ is a hymn to our anger and the fact that surviving is hard. The film kicks back against toxic positivity and the idea of the ‘well-behaved’ survivor holding space for messy, uncomfortable truths and insists they are worthy of being seen.
Mirror
‘Mirror’ explores what it means to be a survivor working inside systems that label and pathologise normal trauma responses as mental health illness. It challenges the divide between ‘professionals’ and ‘survivors’, reclaiming our lived experience as knowledge and power.
The Story
‘The Story’ reflects on the lifelong embodied experience of survival. It traces how survival lives in the body as the site of trauma, and the site of healing and the only place we can live.
We
‘We’ imagines a survivor coming into community for the first time – recognising herself in others and understanding her experience as political. ‘We’ is an affirmation of collectivity and an incitement for us to gather together.
She Walks…
She Walks…is a short film combining digital artwork, music, spoken word, rap and hand-drawn animation.
Part of the wider Restless project, She Walks… is based on a poem Viv wrote after walking a 110 mile stretch of the South West Coast Path.
At its heart is the restless sea – a metaphor for slow, insistent change.