Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Monday, March 16, 2026 at 7pm for “Viscosities,” a special screening of three moving image works by Lucy Beechthat explore relationships between waste, creativity, and transformation, followed by an in-person discussion with the artist.
Viscosity is a measure of resistance to flow. In Lucy Beech’s work, it becomes a way of thinking with substances that do not simply flow, but thicken, adhere, and, in that process, accumulate meaning. Beech’s films and videos track the infrastructural life of matter, how bodies and environments are managed through substances, and how that management produces residue that cannot be fully cleared, in writing as much as in industrial and ecological work. The program brings together Warm Decembers, A Map of the Pit, and excerpts from Hymnal, three collaborations that approach these concerns through different materials and forms.
Films
Lucy Beech, Warm Decembers (2023, 27 minutes)
The film is based on a poem by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and was developed through exchanges with writer Cassie Westwood. Framed by Cassie’s personal experience of transition and Sedgwick’s notes, the film adopts creative approaches to psychic and poetic waste, focusing on the integration of memories, desires, and rejected identifications. Its central coming-of-age narrative follows Beatrix, a teenager navigating delayed grief and sensory encounters with her deceased father. By tracing flows of bodily and urban waste, the film reflects on loss, creativity, and the embodied process of self-making.
Lucy Beech & James Richards, A Map of the Pit (2025, 12 minutes)
Combining dairy technologies, folk dance, and virtuosic mime, A Map of the Pit journeys through various industrial landscapes and bodily expressions. The film was co-edited by Lucy Beech and James Richards with song covers of “I Want You to Know Me" by White Light and “Still They Move” by Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld and was commissioned by Tate Modern and presented as part of an event curated by James Richards and Alvin Lie.
Lucy Beech & Lyra Pramuk, Hymnal (selected excerpts) (2025, approx. 20 minutes total)
A selection of excerpts from Hymnal, an audio-visual project developed as a cinematic accompaniment to musician Lyra Pramuk’s 2025 live tour “Hymnal.” The visual material was produced in collaboration with conservationists, ecologists, and environmental scientists engaged in rewilding contaminated ecosystems. By incorporating technologies and infrastructures that are integral to these hidden worlds of renewal, the visuals draw viewers deep into ecosystems as they undergo repair.
