Intimate Strangers

Quivering with fear or vanishing in the silence, her voice emerges from an isolated urban home.

Nervously, sometimes provocatively, moving, her hands search for security in metropolises.

This inscrutable woman, enshrouded in the polished surface of urbanity, speaks to the strangers of her audience. Enigmatically yet intimately, sharing details of her trauma of being stalked, she does not disclose her identity. Intimate Strangers refers to the viewership between the audience and the woman formed by this subtle disclosure.

The voyeuristic view scrutinises the banal details of a woman and urbanity built over the politics of looking that exists between the opposite subjecthood of the looking (the audience) and the looked upon (the woman). The intensity evoked by this act of looking manipulates the inherent nature of the audio-visual medium, separating it into the audio and the visual. This visual narrative of the female body in the anonymity of city space positions the audience in the role of stalker, complicit in the scopophilia. The audio narrative of the coupled female and male voices articulates the isolated victimhood. Through the tension of coexistence, the audience are brought into dichotomous states of subjectivity: the stalker and the stalked.

Intimacy and strangeness, the seeing and the seen, and the discrete perceptions of the visual and the audio – under the smooth surface, they uncompromisingly coexist and agitate. The tranquility of an urban home is ruffled and leaves the audience in a place that is strange yet intimate.