Works&Projects

Synopsis:

Migration exists on numerous levels from the personal to the public, from the tourist to the asylum seeker. Yo-yo Yo-yo uses images of travel to suggest the perpetual voyage in search of a cultural home. Archival footage taken by Makhoul’s grandfather is interlaced with animated footage of a giraffe.

Hylton, born to Spanish parents, and Palestinian artist Makhoul, who came to Britain from Israel to study in the 1980s came together to explore their different experiences of cultural migration / displacement and to raise questions about notions of 'belonging' and 'not belonging'. In his essay to accompany the film Sean Cubitt wrote:

'The giraffe, alone among quadrupeds, lifts its two left legs forwards in synch with one another, then its right, walking in step with itself like a pantomime horse. No beast was ever as surreal. No creature better emblematises the unforgiving absurdity of evolution, nor better encapsulates the way in which this utterest abstraction of the wild becomes the endearing, familiar, icon of the tourist trip par excellence, safari.'

The work was projected after dark onto a pyramid structure located on Pulteney Bridge in Bath, UK.