In Where We Once Played | Film Screening

The film follows interdisciplinary artist Edward Rollitt during the final stages of installing his exhibition Where We Once Played at The Bomb Factory Art Foundation in Marylebone, London. The show transforms the gallery’s 5,500-square-foot space into ten immersive rooms that chart the psychological terrain of childhood. Working across sculpture, installation, film and photography, Rollitt is known for constructing atmospheric environments where objects carry emotional and symbolic weight. His installations often use antique furniture, dust-covered relics and organic materials to evoke memory, identity and the passage of time.

In Where We Once Played, each room acts as a chapter in a loose narrative moving from birth toward the brink of adulthood. The environments combine surreal imagery with fragments of domestic space: beds of burnt feathers, honey-dripped desks, baths filled with torn pages and remnants of childhood bedrooms. Together they create a dreamlike landscape where memory unfolds not as a linear story but as a sensory and emotional experience. The project also marks a collaborative expansion of Rollitt’s practice.

Working with cinematographer and lighting designer Peter Bishop, sound designer Frankie Beirne, costume designer Gleb Ignatov and producer Rowan Mackintosh King, the exhibition incorporates soundscapes, theatrical elements and imagined characters that inhabit some of the rooms while others remain empty, charged with absence. The film documents the final moments before the exhibition opens: Rollitt moving through the rooms, adjusting objects and inhabiting the emotional states that shaped them. It reveals the process behind an installation that is both deeply autobiographical and universally resonant—a meditation on childhood, memory and the irreversible passage into adulthood. 

A film by Edward Rollitt
Presented by Victoria Law Gallery
Duration 4 minutes and 28 seconds
2025