A central figure in experimental music for more than five decades, Phill Niblock developed a body of work in which sustained sound, duration and minute transformations invite radically different ways of listening. Alongside his music, he created “The Movement of People Working”, a vast silent film cycle observing manual labour around the world not as documentary, but as movement: a choreography of gestures, rhythms and time.
Presented throughout the four days of OUT.FEST, this installation brings together five films from the series, shot in Portugal, the Arctic, Brazil, Lesotho and Peru/Mexico, alongside a selection of Niblock’s compositions spanning several decades. In keeping with the composer's own exhibition practice, image and sound are played independently, each from its own source, never synchronised and never paired in the same way twice. Each encounter produces new resonances, unexpected correspondences and fleeting alignments, while the daily reordering of both programmes ensures that no two visits are ever quite the same, inviting audiences to experience Niblock's work as he so often conceived it: through time, chance and sustained listening.