Felix Melia’s work revolves around an engagement with space. It considers the narratives encoded within architectural spaces, infrastructures and various events. Melia’s work often stems from a conflict between primary experiences and the second hand narratives of representation. His works are an effort to refract and distil the semiotic potential of the places and objects he encounters. Melia positions himself between confluent strands of romantic, social and visual narratives, and the spatial, physical and perceptual dynamics that produce these events.

Felix Melia will present excerpts of three works at the Cinema Dynamo: The Place of Dead Roads, 2014 (Collaboration with Josh Bitelli); A Day Like Any Other, 2013; Dogs On The Roads, 2011,

The Place of Dead Roads, 2014
(collaboration with Josh Bitelli)
Negotiating thresholds and barriers, desire lines and protocols, this film surveys a number of charged, essential spaces: an abandoned cinema filled with engine casings, a hinterland beyond the biggest night club in North Africa and a sprawl of architectural palimpsests.
Two riders on a moped act as standard bearers for a transparent flag. As they carry the flag aimlessly, through a system of roads void of resolution, it writhes in the wind distorting our view of the landscape beyond it, and sketching the column of air through which it moves. The action takes place amongst groupings of architectural skeletons and ashen real estate billboards, set against a backdrop of arid farmland, eroding mud brick walls and the Atlas Mountains.
The film explores the relationships between the romantic, archetypal narratives surrounding movement and the notions of social mobility, labour and production. Any hierarchy amongst the stories represented dissipates as a holistic narrative and the systems by which it was constructed coil together.

A Day Like Any Other, 2013.
A Day Like Any Other is comprised of appropriated video and audio from Hood 2 Hood the Blockumentary directed by Aquis Bryant, and Endgame by Samuel Beckett. The video draws a comparison between the repetitive, cyclical nature of events in Beckett’s play and the similarly recurrent explanations and stories of ‘real’ life in Hood 2 Hood; stories which allude to the sedentary metaphysics and social immobility imposed upon its protagonists. The words ‘all day everyday’ literally encircle the imagery of the work. A commonly employed assertion within the appropriated footage, these words describe a refusal to give in, whilst highlighting the limited dynamic of the environments the characters inhabit.
In making this comparison and by using material appropriated from the Internet in the case of both the video and audio A Day Like Any Other also considers the possibilities and discrepancies between physical and cultural displacements, distances and mobilities.

Dogs on the Roads, 2011
This early video work began with a spontaneous response to a story, told through a chance encounter on a street in Varna the Bulgarian seaside resort. For many years organised crime factions dominated the resort, and in an effort to fortify their homes and secure their own safety, residents of the town’s suburbs posted guard dogs behind fences and gates. With the ‘mob’ presence now weakened these empty streets continue to contain the relics of the story. But as the dogs bark incessantly against the heat of the day, the camera makes little attempt to uncover the town’s sensational past, and focuses instead on an oddly closed mouthed present.