The first collaboration between filmmaker Luke Fowler and acclaimed sound recordist Chris Watson, Enceindre, is a study in film and sound of two 16th century fortified cities: Berwick in the North-East of England and Pamplona in the Navarre region of the North of Spain.

The film considers the wider psychological and social resonances of what it means to live within a town defined by its historical complex of defensive walls and bastions. By adopting an “infra-sensitive” approach to place; Enceindre draws on overlooked acoustic perspectives and lucid camerawork to propose a new framework in which to consider these anachronistic structures.

If the word Enceinte (meaning the “main defensive enclosure of a fortification”) is synonymous with “the body of the place”– what does it mean to live within a body that is outside of time and without purpose? Could these places be considered Heterotopias? Or are they – as WG Sebald describes – alien structures denuded from human history?

2018, 16mm film to HD video, 21 min, courtesy of The Modern Institute