“When the sun sets into a clear crisp horizon, and when there is no land in front of you for a few hundred miles, and no distant moisture that could become, at the final moment, a backlit cloud that obscures the opportunity, you stand a very good chance of seeing the green ray.” -Tacita Dean.

Images of friends and landscapes are cut, fragmented, and reassembled on an overhead projector as hands guide their shape and construction in this film stemming from Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia). The voice tells a story about a not-too-distant past, a not-too-distant ruin, with traces of nostalgia articulated in terms of lore. This is knowledge and memory passed down and shared not from wistful loss, but as a pastiche of rumination, reproduction, and creation.

“It’s going to be quite soundless; the roar of our aircraft is drowning everything else. We are running straight into the most gigantic of soundless fireworks in the world, and here we go to drop our bombs.”

“Time has not been kind to Karimir Malevich’s painting, Black Square. In 1915, when the work was first displayed, the surface of the square was pristine and pure; now the black paint has cracked revealing the white ground like mortar in crazy paving.” This film documents a tedious process of dismantling and reassembling 16 mm found footage. The film collage intimates functions of a curtain, while the recorded optical track describes the film’s subsequent destruction during its first projection.

The #Renegade dance trend that took over social media in 2019 was based on a chopped and looped sound sample of the song "Lottery" by K Camp. The dance was initially choreographed and posted on Instagram by Jaliah Harmon, but it gained fame when White TikTok influencers co-opted and popularized it. This led to backlash and protests over the appropriation of the dance. However, Jaliah Harmon was eventually credited, and she has been recognized by media and fellow Black creators for her

contributions.

Only the beloved keeps our secrets weaves together a fragmented script sampled from online recordings of everyday ritual and performance (through song and dance) and everyday erasures, alongside other material, ambiguous landscapes, growing plants in an abandoned development. Collected over the last five years, mostly from Palestine, moments from this material appear as moving layers with images building in density on top of each other, obscuring what came before in an accumulation of constant testament and constant erasure. Retrieving, in this unfolding accumulation and dissipation of testament, certain moments that have passed us by as noise, what we can not turn to see and what we can not turn away from. Uncounted bodies counter their own erasures, appearing on a street, on a link, on a feed. Words from their songs are broken up and reformed. Maybe it is here between seeing and not seeing, between appearance and disappearance, that what could be retrieved from the wreck can be glimpsed.

The piece is structured around footage taken from an Israeli military surveillance camera. On March 19, 2014, 14 year-old Yusuf ­Shawamreh crossed the ‘separation fence’ erected by the Israeli military near Hebron. He was going to pick Akub, an edible plant that grows at high altitudes and blooms for only a short period of time, and a delicacy in Palestinian cuisine. Israeli forces ambushed him and shot him dead. After a court injunction the military surveillance footage was released and consequently circulated online.

Only the beloved keeps our secrets invites us to consider the forms of entanglement between the destruction of bodies and the erasure of images, and the conditions under which these same bodies and images might once again reappear.