During a residency at the British School at Rome, Dunhill and O’Brien became fascinated by the slow, stately movement of the electric gates behind the studios — a pace that seemed noticeably at odds with almost everything else in Rome.
Rome’s foreign academies and institutes each function as cultural outposts, established to support the study of the city while also representing their own national culture. Dunhill and O’Brien began to notice that many of them also possessed rather fine examples of slow-moving electric gates.
With varying degrees of success, they sought permission to film them. The American, French and Egyptian Academies declined on security grounds. Those that agreed were filmed opening and closing without any traffic passing through: once from the outside looking in, and once from the inside looking out.
As the gates repeatedly opened and closed, the viewer’s position shifted between outsider and insider, audience and participant. There was a certain collector’s enthusiasm to the exercise, but the differences between the institutions — including who was willing to let the gates be filmed at all — inevitably became part of the work.
GATES
