Cinema

Screened for the first time at Towner, Felix Melia’s film Money For Nothing delves into an archaeology of tall tales, exploring conceptions of value, work, sanctuary, friendship and trust. 

The film follows Tim Akister as he navigates the stratified spaces of East London, trawling scrap metal and salvaging bric-a-brac. Tim reflects on his past and ruminates on life as he experiences it, while continuing to look and to find.  

Money for Nothing explores the ways we endow value and use stories to create meaning, construct our identities and form commonalities. It highlights the atmospheric power of public narratives employed by the state, which can link individual people to wider ideologies of social control and lead us to construct our identities against someone else. 

The film will be looped in the Towner Cinema from 10.00am to 5.00pm.  

An in-conversation with artist and director Felix Melia and Siufan Adey, co-founder of architecture collective Afterparti, will take place the next day, Saturday 26 November 2022 at 2.00pm. 

This event sits alongside Brewers Towner International, on display at Towner 15 October 2022 to 22 January 2023.  

The film will be captioned.   

Combining moving image, writing, installation and performance, Felix Melia’s work addresses notions of public and private space, intimacy and agency. It is an exploration of the ways we perceive, move through and dwell in our environments.  

He is particularly interested in the physical gestures and expressions we make to become visible and develop selfhood within regulated and often exclusionary spaces. In tandem to this, Melia’s work draws on the codes of storytelling as a way of unpacking and interpreting the languages we use to express ourselves and relate to one another.