Canaries.              2022 (15 mins 59 sec)

The word canary evokes the light yellow song bird kept in a cage, whose death warns miners of toxic gas. The word can also mean a sweet wine, a wild dance, an informer, a convict, a guinea or a sovereign. 

Basking in August sun on a plaza of artificial grass in Canary Wharf; regarded from all sides by the compound eyes of the towering global bank skyscrapers, a super giant outdoor TV screen shows David Attenborough’s solemn and beautiful cataloguing of habitat destruction. With the sound down. Some musak plays from somewhere nearby to the super giant pixels -don’t get too close  to them or it doesn’t look any good. 

Exclusive, glittering bars offer top price champagne and oysters to the exclusive and glittering. Apex predators cruise the warm shallows, apparently oblivious of the cameraman. The same sun shines on everyone. Every thing. 

In the human environment a war rages. Another financial crisis is building up to its orgasmic climax of fiscal opportunity - for the exclusive and glittering - and all the old crises of poverty, inequality, addiction, mental health, starvation and crime seem pushed away; neatly apportioned their own compartment, under the compound gaze. 

And meanwhile a constant stream of humanity, like London’s surly beige river, is reflected. 

Who, here then, is the canary?

I made this film and soundtrack out of collected fragments of the moment, my own humanity, and a feint, lingering smell.