Passing the Baby (2020)

A film project in progress
Sarah Drury

Passing The Baby is intended to resonate with current moments large and small, when children change hands.  A small rupture occurs at each transition, including the joyful transit among loved ones and the potential transfer into the possession of another.  There is the possibility of leaving one family to be taken into another, cutting across intimate personal/social/cultural bonds, and the re-forming of those bonds differently, as in adoption.  And there is the paradigm of total dispossession, the passing of the baby into uncertainty.

This project started in exploring techniques of time-sequencing reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge’s Motion Studies, which focused on mundane everyday actions in a scientific methodology that purported to be socially value-free.  In Relational Paradigms sequences, I point to social values inherent in these gestures, and bring them to the surface as objects of contemplation.

I was working on Passing of the Baby during the summer of 2020, while the relentless perpetration of the murder of Black people at the hands of police was witnessed globally, and globally protested. The work on this project continues as an ongoing exploration of both the love and the violence of transracial adoption, located as it is on a spectrum of the systemic racism that decimates children and families, and the fragile possibility of repair and hybrid kinship.