For his second show at IBID, Shovlin presents Jesus Rinzoli's Hiker Meat, an ongoing
collaboration between himself, Mike Harte, who provided both the initial story draft and title for
the film at the project's centre, and Euan Rodger, who wrote the score. The exhibited works are
taken from the ongoing Hiker Meat Project (2009-), a partial adaptation of his earlier work
Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology 1976-81 (2003-6), an archive of material from fans and musicians of
a fictional German band. At Lustfaust's periphery was a narrative sketch for the exploitation film
Hiker Meat - for which the band had composed a soundtrack. These notes were taken as a starting
point for the larger Hiker Meat Project, presented here as a work in progress.
At IBID, the project is presented through scenes from the film and its related ephemera - scripts,
score, posters - revealed throughout the exhibition space. Examining the degree to which a film
director - or artist - has control over their works' intended message, meaning and historical legacy,
the exhibition explores the inherent tension within processes of collaboration and adaptation in any
creative endeavour.
Intended as a deconstruction of the 1970/80s exploitation era of film and as a celebration of the
relationship between the visuals and audio within the genre, the project originates from a rough-cut
film derived from the initial narrative sketch based on imagined director Jesus Rinzoli's vision for
Hiker Meat. The video installation at the center of the show has been produced by collaging over
1000 clips of found footage, each taken from films made during the aforementioned era.
The creation of the collaged film, presented here across 60 screens featuring 60 different loops of
scene-types (i.e. a young girl exploring woods, a young man descending into a cellar, etc), is the first
in a number of interrelated processes that result in the development of a new screenplay and
soundtrack for Hiker Meat along with a number of film posters and script variations; each of these
scripts repositioning the narrative of the film according to a specific language and its implied social,
political and historical concerns. These variations, represented here by film posters and scripts for
the Italian, Spanish and American cuts of the film (the latter being Hiker Meat itself), are
subsequently woven into the beginnings of a faux historical timeline for the film and its troubled
production and distribution.