The Approach is one of a series of moving image works reflecting humanity’s relationship to hostile or oppressive environments, while exploring the liminal narrative of unresolved events. It forms part of an extended interest in the notion of suspended trauma - the effect of a continuous retelling of dramatic/traumatic events through shared narratives particularly via mass media, displaced in time and place. Under the research project of the same title, this body of work questions the potential of ‘retelling’ to create, what Lacan terms ‘a missed encounter with the real’ where the ‘real’ becomes the lost object obscured behind layers of representation. In The Approach, the physical degeneration of the actual environment is in transition bet...