The hostel interior is a low buzz of distant, overlapping sounds, the walls appear stained by time: soaking up years of blood, sweat and dirt. Under the constant atmosphere of violence, homeless hostel residents live side by side but in isolation. Seldom leaving his room and haunted by the spectre of the family he lost, Derek lives his life from moment to moment: without the safety nets most of us take for granted. Significant life choices –involving financial difficulties, mental and physical health – are always close to the surface.
Disconnected and abandoned, he navigates the space between the sedate daily routine of the hostel and his fierce, barely suppressed emotions.
God’s Promises Mean Everything is an intimate, long-term character portrait that extends over several years, but limits space to a single room. As the project progressed and rooms became uninhabitable, the initial notion of a ‘single’ space became less defined by the physical and instead transformed into a semi-fictionalised interior; one comprising a number of rooms that combine to create a single, imagined site featuring disorientating perversions of space and spatial impossibilities. Within this carefully constructed and claustrophobic world, the bed became a persistent symbol of a destructive daily cycle; a place of comfort and rest, but also a place from which one cannot escape.
In a collaboration spanning over six years, God’s Promises Mean Everything reveals the unsettling fragility in the connections that make up our everyday experience.
The book is to be published by Dewi Lewis Publishing on 9th May 2024.
Mark Chapman is an award-winning filmmaker and artist from North East, England. His work has been exhibited internationally across filmmaking and photography contexts. He recently completed work on God’s Promises Mean Everything (2024), an intimate photographic study of a hostel resident. His moving-image work has been selected for numerous prestigious film festivals including Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, Edinburgh
International Film Festival, Uppsala International Film Festival, IKFF Hamburg, Sao Paulo. International Short Film Festival and Jihlava International Documentary Festival. He has a PhD in Film Practice and works as a Lecturer in Film Production at University of Greenwich.
Instagram: @markchapmanuk / Twitter: @markchapmanfilm