Scripting Non-Space(s)

Presenting Scripting Non-Spaces to Fernanda Eberstadt and Sander Pleij editors of The European Review of Books, January 29, 2026.

Discussing film locations in the short film (IN)VISIBLE 2025.

(IN)VISIBLE refuses the domestic interior as the default site for domestic violence narratives. Traditional spaces, kitchens, staircases, bedrooms, often carry implicit surveillance, control, and blame, aestheticised through patriarchal cinematic codes as Laura Mulvey critiques. By filming in non-space, I reframe the survivor’s body in relation to material, light, and architectural tension, rather than dramatised trauma. Large-scale images of a space nearby, the site where we would work during the residency and the place where community events would take place and panel discussions within the New Acres community. Curated discarded objects overlay skeletal architecture with acts of care, reclaiming autonomy. This spatial language, now present in (IN)VISIBLE, has been exhibited in cinemas around the world, bringing the concept of non-space into different cities and cinematic contexts.

Non-space thus is a strategy for my filmmaking through a feminist lens: a means to dismantle conventional visual codes of violence, foreground material and spatial negotiation, and invite audiences into reflective, ethically attuned modes of spectatorship.