When you began developing the project you spoke of ‘the Matrix of Gypsy Memory’ and how collective memory in Romani culture is retained through places and through people. Could you explain how this idea is presented in the film?

Delaine Le Bas: In the film it is presented through my grandmother’s voice telling the stories, and the physical places, combined with the animation of my work, which is another version of those stories. It’s the combination of three different elements about the past and the present.

Damian James Le Bas: Also we were trying to guide people through those spaces. Visually in the film you move from the domestic situation, where these memories are typically recollected, and doesn’t look that different to anybody else’s living space, a modern Gypsy home. We move from there to the places where these things happened, or as close as we could get to them. We’re also taken there through animated elements coming to life - objects from the past and the present and purely imagined symbols - as mediators between these two levels, the past and present.

Also you hear Delaine’s voice asking questions to her Grandmother, my Great Grandmother, so she’s playing the part of the present interlocutor. Tim Harrison, the Sound Designer, came up with the idea of putting the sounds of the present (the clock, the TV) and the voices of Delaine and Delaine’s Grandmother projected through speakers into one end of a large physical space that represented the living room. Past noises (bird song, supernatural sounds) were projected into the other end of the space. Then with specially designed microphones Tim walked through the space, physically representing the move from the present to the past, tracing the memories through physical motion. When listening to it through headphones we hope that idea comes across.

The work centres on the oral history tradition of the Romani community represented here by your Grandmother/Great Grandmother’s narrative - why are the stories she tells the ones that you have chosen to record and present?

DLB: All of these stories my Grandmother tells I’ve heard since I was a small child. All of these places still exist but many of the characters were dead when I was born. I know these people and these places so intimately through the stories, and that’s what I wanted other people to feel.

Also I wanted to get across how my Grandmother talks about quite supernatural happenings in quite a normal way. Like it’s nothing out of the ordinary. And that’s always been the case with these stories. For many years I’ve been fascinated by this way of telling stories that are not overly dramatic but their content is in a sense.

DJLB: Over the years we’ve collected material from a number of relations and other people, most of who have died since, so we’ve not had the chance to go back to them about this project. And though some of the material was good, it didn’t fit with this strong supernatural theme - supernatural things dealt with almost as if they were banal parts of everyday life, which we thought had a real charm to it.

Also, in the original transcript we had a transcript from my memory of another relation of ours, Bob Ayres, telling stories about ghosts. I was pretty sure it was accurate, but we tried acting it and representing what he said in different ways but it didn't work. He’s since died and this is one of the reasons we’ve restricted the material to Julie’s stories.

But with bringing in the other characters in the stories we hope to create a route into the collective memory that we’d be listening to and dealing with for the viewer of the piece.

The work brings to life elements of Delaine’s embroideries alongside photographs from the Le Bas’ family album. Why did you choose to bring these textiles into the film?

DLB: The textiles, and fabric collages as I call them, have always been part of the stories; they are my visual interpretations of the stories without the words. It was important to me to be able to incorporate them with my Grandmother’s oral version of the stories.

The little stitched girl in the embroideries, a recurring figure in my work, came about many years ago, and is and is based on stories of what my Grandmother was wearing when she was small. I suppose she is a cross between my Grandmother and me, the past and the present combined.

DJLB: It introduces ideas of history repeating itself, of an inheritance of memory, between generations of Romani women - so she was a crucial character. Delaine’s work often offers one representation of this ‘thought world’ that is difficult to describe to people in regular unequivocal language. The footage and the sound recorded on location offered other representations of old stopping places, and bringing in Katerina Athanasopoulou to integrate the elements from the embroideries helped to put Delaine’s artistic interpretation back to where it started. To show that it had a place of origin.

Especially in light of the fact that the myth still persists that Romani people, Gypsies, are rootless. Whereas families either have a deep connection to one area or several different areas in the same way that anybody else does.

What are the symbols that we see rising up from the ground? What other visual references in the film would you say are important to representing the Romani community from an insider perspective?

DLB: The symbols come from a book by Jean-Paul Clebert called The Gypsies published in the 1960s. They represent different people, or whether a place was good or not to stop at. We wanted to use these symbols, as you’re not quite sure what they are, what words they represent.

DJLB: It’s a form of pictographic writing like hieroglyphics. And it quite subtly addresses the idea that Gypsies don't have a written culture.

DLB: That is something that we’re constantly trying to address - the idea that most people assume if you say that you are a Gypsy, or a Romani person, or a Traveller that it’s a lifestyle choice and there’s no culture attached to it.

We wanted to weave within this work this idea of our culture, and the symbols are another way of talking about it.

DJLB: It’s hard to know where to start when thinking of symbols and cherished objects. The symbol par excellence for most people is the English Gypsy caravan or wagon or vardo. But in reality most people were poor and didn't have them, so the wagon doesn’t make an appearance in the film.

There are eyes and birds, which are very important, as there’s an old family saying: ‘There’s birds in the bushes and eyes in the sky’ which means watch what you’re saying as anyone could be listening or watching at any time. Those symbols loom large in the film.

As do horses, and particularly china horses, cherished objects for those who collected them that surrounded us as we were growing up, but in some ways are now a sad representation of how the culture has changed. Not many people have real horses these days so they collect china ones instead.

The animated elements have been produced with animator Katerina Athanasopoulou. How have you both found working with animation and collaborating with another artist?

DLB: The whole process for me has been fascinating and has expanded my work in ways that I hadn’t thought was possible. I love the ways Katerina has used the embroideries and really taken on board all of the conversations we had about the possibilities of the work.

And with Tim’s sound as well, the whole piece captures what we were trying to capture: the past, the present, and the different ways of telling stories – the film narrative, the embroidery narrative, my Grandmother speaking and Tim’s sound. It’s how I feel when I’m hearing my Grandmother speak; I see all these things as well. I hope that’s what we’ve achieved between the four of us working together.

DJLB: I hope people will like the way we present it in the gallery at CGP London with the armchair and the rug to represent what it feels like in my Nan’s front room.

It’s been a long process, far longer than I’d usually spend on a film of this length. The length and collaborative element allowed us to create something different. We gave Tim and Katerina some free creative reign to digest the materials and see how they responded, and the result for me is incredible. I think it’s one of the subtlest pieces about Romani culture I’ve ever seen. Words like Gypsy, Roma, Traveller, Romani, they’re not mentioned in the film, they don’t need to be, as it comes from our culture, it’s not made about it.

Katerina’s animation, mixed with the footage I shot of Delaine, has captured Delaine’s mental visual world. And the sound for me has distilled the soundscape that exists in my head and from where my poetry comes from. It’s incredible to see how they’ve both made it happen.