As You Were (2024).

50min, HD, colour, stereo. Eng w/ closed captions. [German subtitles available].

How do our private experiences inform our professional selves that through our institutions impact the lives of others?

As You Were was made in conversation with maternity specialists from the UK’s National Health Service who have given birth themselves to query the boundaries of professional, personal and institutional understanding.

Footage of historical maternity artefacts from the archives at the Royal College of Surgeons physically situate these questions. These objects intersect with scenes of a coxed (instructed) women’s rowing team as they are directed where to place their limbs and utilise their breathing. The film is also entangled with Mann’s own experiences of matrescence in art and academia, and includes intimate documentation of the artist’s domestic life.

above: As You Were, (2024, video still).

cont.

Institutions borrow from our personal lives and co-opt the language of mothering as ‘practices of care’. Yet for their duration pregnancy and birth are processes of transformation for the individual and such embodied acts of non-institutional behaviour place us outside the dominant culture.

As You Were creates a space of listening about the ways that institutional practices permeate our personal lives, examining this lineage through women’s healthcare. The film asks if there is an institutional context where such transformative embodied experiences might be imagined as a benefit to practice.