3 Channel Film
28 min.
(2025)
A Third Hand is an experimental docufiction that investigates themes of identity, relationality, and stigma within a fragile reality of precarity. At its heart lies an autofictional narrative, drawn from lived experience yet fictionalized, following the artist’s friendship with Su during her recovery from psychiatric hospitalization. This personal story runs in parallel with a guided city tour from the Paulus Church homeless center in Rotterdam, led by people with lived experience of homelessness (the artist’s volunteer work), and with encounters with religious preachers whom the artist met unexpectedly at Nieuwe Binnenwegplein in Rotterdam during Black Friday. These distinct yet intertwined stories echo and clash, inviting reflection on a shared condition of unrootedness. In this state, identity, embodiment, and the sense of home reveal themselves as fractured, scattered splinters searching for belonging. The work’s fragmented narrative structure and subjective camerawork mirror this disorientation and search; the story does not unfold linearly, but emerges through coincidence and intimate involvement.
The work closely examines the relationships between caregivers and those they care for, and the ethical ambiguities that shape these interactions, primarily by questioning what it means to listen and watch. At times, the work draws on therapeutic approaches—not as clinical methods, but as ways to think through presence, and vulnerability. Through this lens, the film gestures toward possible emancipatory resolutions while simultaneously raising ethical questions about the violence inherent in demanding legibility, appropriating experience, or flattening relational complexity. It reflects on the tensions between personal, and institutional frameworks, asking where care begins, who is authorized to provide it, and how meaning emerges in spaces where systems and subjectivities collide.