8mm, 16mm, digital colour film, single-channel, 17-channel sound, installation, Commissioned by Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 17:39 min loop.
You Can’t See Speed, 2025
The film follows the arc of Stefanou’s surreal and performative interventions with different communities and places, leading to a collaboration with blind motorbike rider and mechanic Matthew Cassar.
The making of the film began three years ago through an encounter on Facebook Marketplace. Stefanou’s life partner, the film’s composer, Joseph Franklin, was searching for a dirt bike to ride. When he met Matthew to test the bike, Matthew remarked, Please don’t ride off with it—I can’t see where you’re going. A collaboration was set in motion, born from chance and back-road exchanges.
In the film, we hear Matthew sing and speak his own creative vocal captions—a poetic description of what is happening both on-screen and within. Dressed in evil eye totems, lace, and crystals, he rides through green paddocks, rests in a quarry where asphalt is mined on the outer edges of Naarm, and sits at home, watching fish in a tank through what he calls blind vision. For Matthew, the bike is a way of moving through and between sighted and non-sighted worlds. He sings, hums, and mimics the sounds of his beloved dirt bikes as he rides through three cinematic formats—8mm, 16mm, and digital.
The horse, a recurring friend in Stefanou’s work—whether costumed or sung to—now becomes a specter, haunting the history of cinema and its deep entanglements with the zoological gaze and the nation state. The film grapples with existential questions of representation, social class and materiality—the absence that emerges from the ease with which privilege names and organises the world with nonchalance and certainty. It reflects on how working-class experience is flattened, co-opted by middle-class (+) representational politics, linking these tensions to histories of labour, race, ableism, and animality, particularly in the construction of the moving image.
The film shifts between resolutions, flashes, fluctuating in and out of visibility, abstraction, obscurity, risk, and pleasure—mirroring the precarious and often unseen experiences of the working class, particularly within Australia’s enduring myth of a classless society. The crystal coated dirt bike becomes a totem, an evil eye—magic against magic, representation against representation...It stands as an antidote to the afflictions of visuality and advocates for a type of accountability of what and where we learn to see. The motor carves a path through the trapped circuitry of moving image—Muybridge’s horse, the death drive, that relentless force—where the blind man momentarily masters his symbolic fate, transforming into something beyond sight. This moment crystallises through a cornucopia of sensorium, working-class sonics, multispecies kinship, and apotropaic symbols.
Credits:
Tina Stefanou – Artist/Director
Matthew Cassar – Performer/Collaborator/Rider
Petra Leslie – Director of Photography
Joseph Franklin – Composer/Sound Designer/Music Producer
Anna Nalpantidis – Creative Producer / Dramaturg / 1st AD
Romanie Harper – Production Designer
Wil Normyle – Second Camera Operator
Hamish Palmer – Gaffer
Zac Millner Cretney – Editor
Daniel Stonehouse (We Are Crayon) – Colourist
Timothy Harvey – Recording Engineer (Creative Vocal Captions)
Tina Stefanou with Matthew Cassar: Creative Vocal Captions
Alistair McLean – Sound Spatialisation and installation mix
Steve Berrick – AV Technologist
Buster – Equine Performer and Collaborator
Tina Stefanou - Horse Worker
Sacajawea - Equine Specialist
Wayne Sullivan – Riding Coach
Scott McConnachie – Bike Rider (Field Recording)
Tom Goodman – Artist Assistant/Runner
Sarah Walker, Tom Denize, and Otis Filley – Camera Assistants
Werner Winklemann: 16mm film processing
MemoryLab: 16mm scanning
Richard Tuohy: 8mm film processing and scanning
Supported by: Arts House and Creative Australia
Music Credits:
Hymn to the Dirt Bike Rider, 2025
Composer/Vocals: Tina Stefanou
Additional Vocals: Lisa Salvo
Recording: Timothy Harvey
Mixing: Joseph Franklin
Brass Orchestration: Joseph Franklin
Flugelhorn/Trumpet: Callum G’Froerer
Additional Recording: Callum G’Froerer
Exhausted Vocalities, 2025
Composer/Vocalist: Tina Stefanou
a thousand tiny mutinies, 2023 (obscured)
Composer/Contrabass Guitar and Artefacts: Joseph Franklin
Recording: Timothy Harvey
Mixing: Timothy Harvey and Joseph Franklin
Mastering: Magnus Lindberg
Label: Nice Music
Music: an incomplete history of the art of the solo violin, 2024 (excerpt)
Composer: Joseph Franklin
Violin: Miranda Cuckson