Puer Deorum

Residency report
During my residency, alongside theory-based research into ideas around how sound takes shape, I began to materialise a project, Ghost Child — an experimental film that blends reality and fiction, memory and folklore. The name Ghost Child derives from the term that describes the metaphor for an overlooked sibling within a family, drawing from personal experience, creating parallels to the ghostliness of the queer sapphic identity within broader relational dynamics and the history of South Asian and Muslim cultures.

The film is an aubade weaving in lived experiences, reinterpreting the mythology in Life’s Secret, a story within Folk Tales of Bengal, 1883, by Lal Behari Day. The underlying narrative thread centers around the story of a boy’s soul living within a fish, only for the body to die during the day and reawaken at night. Through non-linear sequencing and scoring, the film plays on ideas around solitude, mortality, time, memory, consciousness, and recalibrating gender.

Adopting the cinematic language of Bollywood through the landscape of Lake Geneva, there is a projection, fallacy of South Asian land and the idea of the land (unruly nature) as a place to flee/seek refuge in when one has lost their mind. Inspired by the genre of neo-documentarism, the project attempts to contextualise myth with real-life anecdotes, world-building through a multi-channel set-up, and an archive of collected audio interviews that will be woven into the narrative as it continues to develop. — Puer Deorum

Biography
Puer Deorum lives and works in London. Their practice navigates the tension between weight and ephemerality, reflecting on mortality and the shifting experience of time. Drawing from cultural context and psycho-socio-political geographies, they move between monochronic, linear frameworks and polychronic, fluid approaches. Through endurance, duration, and interpretive actions, Puer Deorum amplifies interpersonal encounters, often weaving dream sequences to probe unstable temporalities.