Essay

A Traceable Past

Manon Revuelta on Sophie & Oscar Bannan’s Chicken Poems

There are moments in Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000) in which she points the camera back at herself. Early on, she uses one hand to film her other hand up close, the screen filled with thick veins rising through rippling, shallowed skin mottled with brown sunspots. Estranged by her ageing body, she refers to the hand as “an animal she does not know”. Later, as she sits in the backseat of a car travelling down a busy country highway, that same hand reaches out to pretend to capture passing vehicles. At certain distances she can momentarily hold trucks between her fingers, claw-like, before they grow in proximity and size. Varda’s hands in action reveal something of her innate capacity for play, defying their earlier disembodiment. They capture the passing cars purely for the sake of releasing them, her fingers the searching tendrils of a woman who, at any age, remains driven by a longing to commune with the world beyond herself before it passes by. They also reveal the candour with which she approaches documentary filmmaking, inclusive of supposedly less remarkable gestures to illustrate a body in time, its unexpected expressions or dances. Similarly, Yvonne Rainer’s famous Hand Movie (1966), is a testament to the expressive grace of the hand. It is a simple 5-minute film of her hand in movement, close-up, which she made from a hospital bed after recovering from major surgery. As the fingers curl, open, hesitate, connect, diverge, the poeticism of a single part of the body (notably a female one) ‘speaks’ without recognisable signs, opens up the possibilities of recorded dance.

I think about these moments of women filming their hands because Sophie Bannan’s photo collage Octopus Time presents a particularly tender collection of tendrils or tentacles. Here too, the body seems to share such an ability to speak, or at least the desire to connect: young and old hands are playing, holding, waving, protecting. The outlier is a photograph of a ring, whose wearer is immediately imagined. Even an absent hand finds its presence here in a piece of jewelry, imbued with a past life in the context of all those animated living hands. This is the wide reach of Chicken Poems: there is a ‘we’ to the ‘I’, people past or peripheral are given an outline. Different sized articles of clothing evoke the selves who wore them across time; a plethora of subtly different roast chickens signals groups of friends or family who have gathered to eat together around a shared centrepiece, time after time. As Danez Smith wrote, “there is no poem greater than feeding someone.”¹

The intimacy of Sophie’s collages lies not only in their personal content but in their composition. The impulse to capture and preserve the fleeting details of living a life is usually a matter of breaking it into distinct frames: pages in a diary, photographs in an album or video. Here, those collected moments can merge and become simultaneous, one whole brain-like cloud. While taking a photograph will always involve a degree of erasure in uprooting a moment from time, here it is tethered back to the broad if still fragmented context of that lived life. One can look at Portrait (Assuaged) or Still Life (Aggravated) and discern an impression of a 10-to-20-year period in the artist’s adulthood, rich with layers and hues: her nascent and then present child, the community who perhaps shaped or supported her, the small details that punctuated her days, the rooms and objects and landscapes that held her, the body she lived in as it changed. As A.L. Steiner, a noted influence of Sophie’s, described finishing her photo collages and standing back: “a traceable past suddenly materializes before me.”²

Steiner also remarked that this traceable past is one that “gives visuality and materiality” to queerness in particular. Those not familiar can find a new sense of it in seeing the mundanities and nuances of a queer life as it is lived, and again, one that is impossible to atomise: “whether…or how each person identifies no longer matters because of the conglomeration, because of the lack of distinction between images. It’s like it is a creation of a world, and it’s not real or fictional. It’s just…a new formulation.”³ That fluidity rings true to subjects in Sophie’s collages, and it’s true that they, too, do not feel wholly fictional or real. Though what she seems to search for beyond truth or fidelity, or even queerness per se, is a sense of being and loving in time. Flowers, skies, and meals echo and repeat across years and locations, forming a web of meaning or ‘new formulation’ from our otherwise chaotic human existence.

In The Ballet, that web of meaning is again woven into the body as Sophie and Oscar, both fluent in the language of dance from an early age, have a vocabulary in their muscles and bones. This is not simply ballet, but the Bannans’ ballet: dance, as in each body’s interpretation of it, can offer a voice for the soul. As Varda and Rainer attest, that kind of dancing is always happening. In a kind of filmic collage, brother, sister, adult and child commune in mirrored gestures: a young Sophie’s sauté in ballet class echoes an adult Oscar in a studio alone; an adult Sophie, turning her head around and around to hold the camera’s gaze, leads to herself and Oscar as children, each turning in circles. Whether contrived or found or both, these moments are pieced together with immense tenderness and knowing, illustrating a profound mutual influence between the siblings despite them never appearing in the same shot.

This collage-like edit also traces the performance of gender within dance traditions. At one point, a young Oscar is shown waltzing primly in a suit with a female partner at what looks like a dance competition. Cut to a young Sophie dancing at home with a teddy bear and throwing it in the air – a marked contrast with the formalism and high femininity of her ballet performances elsewhere in the film. We then return to a younger Oscar in a skirt, pink singlet and headscarf, dancing with unabashed expression and energy. Those visible moments of freedom run deep: there is no ‘wrong’ clothing, in dancing or in life. Sophie, in adulthood, swaps tutus for neutral black leggings and singlets. In Never fully dressed without a smile, Oscar presents the dresses he wore as a child, hand-me-downs from family members (and worn in several scenes in The Ballet). They sit among dresses he has made or altered, and others he has collected on travels through Europe, resonant artefacts of a lived autonomy when it comes to identity. As stage and world blur, gender is truly a set of possibilities – dance has merely given momentary transparency to what is, in fact, always costume.

¹ Smith, Danez. ‘anti poetica’. Bluff, Graywolf Press, NY 2024.

² Cvetkovich, Ann. ‘Oral history interview with A.L. Steiner’. Smithsonian Archives of American Art, June 2024. http://aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_22365

³ Ibid.

This text response was commissioned by Gus Fisher Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition Chicken Poems in The Changing Room, 2025.