Supermarket Loop (2023)
Supermarket Loop (2023) consists of a single take of a driver, framed by the rear-view mirror, endlessly circulating a retail underground carpark. The film is an autobiographical exploration that started with a desire to play with the cinematic road movie in the context of everyday driving. Unlike the tropes of the genre, the resulting film offers no journey, grand landscapes, or thrill of the unknown, instead it depicts circular route inside an underground supermarket garage. Instead, this alternative looped road movie generates a playful moment that breaks away from the tyranny of the mundane, through the frivolous act of refusing to conform to the rules of the space, by simply not parking.
The film was part of a commission for Gallery North, Newcastle Upon Tyne and premiered as part of solo exhibition Radio Off in February 2023.
Cecilia Stenbom is currently based in Gateshead, UK.
Cecilia Stenbom is an artist filmmaker, originally from Sweden. Her works span from narrative fiction and hybrid documentary, to experimental, artists’ film and moving image art. Her practice interrogates the moving image and its relationship to the real world – how the moving image permeates reality and, in turn, how the everyday is transformed into narrative fiction. Her films are often set in media saturated, consumer driven everyday environments – within public, institutional and domestic structures – thematically exploring how these structures affect notions of identity and belonging, and, in turn, conditions behaviour and interaction.