You Can’t See Speed, 2025
single channel video, 8mm, 16mm, digital colour, 17 channel sound,
aluminium screen
17:39 mins
200.0 x 400.0 cm
Artist, director: Tina Stefanou
Performer, collaborator, rider: Matthew Cassar
Director of Photography: Petra Leslie
Composer, sound designer, music producer: Joseph Franklin
Creative producer, dramaturg, first assistant director: Anna
Nalpantidis
Production designer: Romanie Harper
16mm/Second camera operator: Wil Normyle
Gaffer: Hamish Palmer
Editor: Zac Millner Cretney
Colourist: Daniel Stonehouse (We Are Crayon)
Video collage designer: Steve Berrick
Equine performer and collaborator: Buster
Equine specialist: Sacajawea
Riding coach: Wayne Sullivan
Bike rider, field recording: Scott McConnachie
Creative vocal captions: Tina Stefanou and Matthew Cassar
Creative vocal recording: Tim Harvey
Artist assistant, runner: Tom Goodman
Camera assistants: Sarah Walker, Tom Denize, and Otis Filley
16mm film processing: Werner Winklemann (Neglab Super)
16mm film scanning: Memory Lab
8mm film processing and scanning: Richard Tuohy (nanolab)
Screen designer and fabricator: Ellen Sayers
Filmed on Taungurung, Bunurong, Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri
Woiwurrung Country
Music credits:
Hymn to the Dirt Bike Rider 2025
Composer, vocals: Tina Stefanou
Additional vocals: Lisa Salvo
Recording: Timothy Harvey
Mixing and brass orchestration: Joseph Franklin
Flugelhorn, trumpet, additional recording: Callum G’Froerer
Exhausted Vocalities 2025
Composer/Vocalist: Tina Stefanou
a thousand tiny mutinies (obscured) 2023
Composer, Contrabass guitar and artefacts: Joseph Franklin
Recording: Timothy Harvey
Mixing: Timothy Harvey and Joseph Franklin
Mastering: Magnus Lindberg
Label: Nice Music
An incomplete history of the art of the solo violin (excerpt) 2024
Composer: Joseph Franklin
Violin: Miranda Cuckson
Commissioned by Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne,
with support from Creative Australia, Arts House and Yamaha
Courtesy the artist
‘I built this fish tank, made a world inside, so that I could imagine
the fish. Envision them swimming amongst sunken wrecks,’
narrates the film’s protagonist: blind motorcycle mechanic and rider
Matthew Cassar. We find him at ease in the back room of his house,
surrounded by half-finished dirt bikes and bike frames. Seated on
a stool in the shape of a horse saddle, he faces a large tank filled
with vibrant coloured fish, while a small rabbit hops about underfoot.
Synthesising voice, imagination, machine and animal, this scene
establishes the film’s central concerns with perception, representation,
social class and materiality, particularly in the construction of cinema
and ‘visual’ culture.
The collaboration between Cassar and Stefanou began with a chance
encounter over three years ago, which sparked a friendship and
creative partnership that led to the development of You Can’t See
Speed 2025. The work follows Cassar through various landscapes:
from a craggy green paddock to a garage workshop, a vast quarry
where asphalt is mined to an artificial film set. Dressed in a reflective
silver helmet and motorcycle gear camouflaged in crystals and
evil eyes, apotropaic symbols of protection, Cassar appears like a
magical figure, himself becoming totemic, wandering across real and
surreal sceneries. Riding through what Cassar calls ‘blind vision’, he
navigates directions, turns and jumps via his trainer’s voice, as the
bike becomes a talisman, representing a form of symbolic mastery
beyond sight.
In his own voice, Cassar describes these various worlds both
on screen and within, where ‘image meets experience’. Cinema
becomes sensorium as singing, humming and storytelling blends
with the vibration of roaring dirt bikes. The film shifts between
resolutions as Cassar rides across three cinematic formats:
Super 8, 16mm and high-definition digital film stocks. Tracing the
material histories of motion picture, the work interrogates notions
of speed, modernity and mechanical process captured on film:
from Eadweard Muybridge’s images of the horse in movement to
the machismo of contemporary motorcycle racing. At the film’s
crescendo, right before it fades to black, Cassar repeats, ‘all
resolutions…all resolutions…all resolutions’, as all film stocks
appear on screen, creating an image where abstraction, obscurity,
risk, and pleasure flash in-and-out of visibility.
The horse, a recurring friend in Stefanou’s work, features within
the film and is further represented in the shape of a horse-bit which
holds the screen suspended high above us. The horse-bite, a
device used to control a horse’s movements, serves as a critique
for the way cinema has historically been a tool for propaganda and
control used to manipulate perceptions of power and the State.
Ultimately, the film challenges the boundaries between sight and
blindness, privilege and mobility, creating a new narrative that
shifts the gaze and reflects on the unseen experiences of the
working class.