Name: Screening: We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher
Start: 2026-03-16T17:00:00+00:00
End: 2026-03-16T19:00:00+00:00
Location: SODA (School of Digital Arts)

The work, developed by Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter, explores the late theorist Mark Fisher’s work, but then goes beyond.
About this Event

Screening: We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher

SODA CINEMA, School of Digital Arts, Manchester Met

Monday March 16th 2026, 5-7pm

‘We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher’ is an artwork made by Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter, working as Close and Remote, who developed the film between 2024-2025. Tim Burrows is the Executive Producer. The work exists as an exploration of the late theorist Mark Fisher’s work, but then goes beyond, asking how his ideas continue to locate themselves within our culture. Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism’ now reads as a user’s manual for the political psychosis of post-Brexit Britain - precarity normalised, education hollowed out, a tech elite mimicking myth (Palantir). Yet in 2026, something stirs, a moment for action and solidarity. Not Saturday protest and work on Monday but the idea of a recombined force against Trash Populism. People are up for it. Refusing the misery feed and returning to action. Turning toward each other, asking new (old) questions.

The whole project has been generated through Instagram. Research, Scripts, Music, Contacts, Screening, Distribution. This is a key aspect of the project, the use of a platform to extract back from. Jodi Dean talks about how digital platforms ‘capture attention’. In this case the platform is used to make something that critiques closed social media spaces. A recapture. The film explores solidarity, shared labour and digital connectivity. It enacts what Fisher insisted was still possible—decapitalised cultural production, collective agency among the ruins of neoliberal atomisation. A reminder that DIY doesn’t mean private - it means working together.

The film is 1 hour 6 minutes and it will be followed by a Q&A and open discussion with Simon Poulter.

Visual Culture Research Group

This is event is supported and hosted by the Visual Culture Research Group at MMU. Research into visual culture at Manchester School of Art has a history reaching back decades. We are an internationally respected, cross-disciplinary and publicly engaged group of theorists, writers, historians, curators, and artists. The politics of visual culture, visibility and representation is one of our key shared concerns. This includes political struggles, the political use of images, geopolitical events, and the micro-politics involved in the production and perception of images.