Imagination + The Rest Is My Ghost
Southeast Asian Premiere
Takashi Makino, Lawrence English Japan, Australia 2026 75 min G
Film grain, spectral beams and low-frequency murmurs: two artists converse in light and sound, channelling the sublime.
Imagination opens this double bill of light and sound. Among the ruins of Japan’s oldest film laboratory were voluminous century-old 35mm and 16mm reels that had been developed but never exposed. Takashi Makino scanned them at 8K for their materiality alone, which gave him nothing but grain in constant motion. Turning from these decayed reels towards a vaster emptiness, he layered the grainy remains of images with over 30,000 photographs of a cloudless sky shot from the roof of the ruins. Lawrence English accompanies Makino’s visuals with a virtuosic performance, expanding the physical experience of emptiness with the sonic sublime.
The second billing, The Rest Is My Ghost, is the final instalment of a trilogy by English, after Cruel Optimism and Wilderness of Mirrors. He uses processed field recordings, synthesis and amplified low-frequency noise as his response to what he calls ‘acid nostalgia’: the past’s hauntings flattened and weaponised in the current political mood. Makino responds intuitively with spectral beams of light penetrating the haze, dancing with the prophetic sounds of a ruinous world. Acting as each other’s muse, they craft a luminous performance that invites us to experience the weight of nothingness and the fullness of being.
Synopsis Writer: Gabriel Goh
24 Oct, Sat 9:00PM / 75 min
Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, Annexe Studio
Undercurrent, Q&A
25 Oct, Sun 7:00PM / 75 min
Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, Annexe Studio
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Imagination + The Rest Is My Ghost
Takashi Makino, Lawrence English
Japan, Australia
2026
No Dialogue
75 min
G
Southeast Asian Premiere
Takashi Makino
Takashi Makino is a Tokyo-based filmmaker who works across film, installation and live performance. His works layer light, grain and sound into abstractions, reaching for the limits of the visible. Still in Cosmos (2009) received the Grand Prix at the 25 FPS Festival in Zagreb and Generator (2011) was awarded the Tiger Short Award at Rotterdam.
Lawrence English
Lawrence English is an Australian-based composer, artist and curator whose work explores sound as a perceptual and embodied experience, and the politics therein. He utilises a variety of approaches including visceral live performance and site-specific installation to create work that invites audiences to consider their relationship to listening, place and embodiment.
Takashi Makino,
Lawrence English