In 2016, Trangmar was commissioned to create a film in commemoration of the Battle of The Somme. To do so, she visited the area, both the landscape, the war graves and the everyday places in Somme.

Unfound (2016) is not a film that has me convinced, and lacks coherence – markedly different to A Play in Time (2008). Trangmar has described the difficulty of creating a work about which so much has already been said, and that the film did not capture her entire response, something which she has set right in a later article (2098).

I can’t help but wonder why there isn’t a voiceover. Unfound seems to demand verbalising, as if Trangmar has decided to keep her thoughts muted. This would have been fine if her thinking were more explicit, through the development of a more strident range of symbols, or carefully placed events, but Unfound seems like a slide show. There is thinking happening, quite clearly – juxtapositions of industry and commemoration, agricultural routine and leisure – but it’s hard to penetrate. A Varda, or a Keiller would have quipped, mused, questioned. And I wonder if this reluctance to narrate is one of the features of video art as a moving image genre. If so, and there most definitely are works which don’t require narration – A Play in Time for starters , then it’s a decision which should arise from the work and its demands. To refuse one of the most powerful facilities of the moving image – to be able to have words and images in a single experience – seems deliberately obstinate. Perverse, in fact.

Trangmar, S. 2019. Passages of Inscription. Photographies 12. pp. 63-80.