Contact:
Website: www.indexthumb.com
Email: indexthumb@pm.me
Instagram: @indexthumb
Based in:
London (UK)
Also involved with:
London Digital Bodies Collective
Artist Film Club
Quick Time Event Substack
In Process Podcast / @inprocess__show
Bio:
Indexthumb a filmmaker and performance artist working with textural moving image, photography and dance. Their creative practice employs multimedia installations that explore queer perception, virtual space, and the ways in which images and bodies produce each other. Indexthumb centres their own trans+ & non-binary body as a phenomenological site of investigation, generating material through a dance practice based in contemporary improvisation and somatics.
Context:
Indexthumb got in touch with the collective through one of our members and submitted a performance-workshop proposal for our festival.
KONTEKST:
2025: Indexthumb’s interactive performance-workshop SOMADEX was hosted at KONTEKST Film Fest: ARCHIVE.
PROJECTS:
SOMADEX (2025)
Interactive performance-workshop
Using contemporary dance and a set of profile pictures gathered from their Facebook page, indexthumb explores the premise that the body is itself a hidden archive of movements. The performance then rolls into a short movement workshop in which participants are guided to explore a moment from their own bodies’ archives.
Hosted at KONTEKST Film Fest: ARCHIVE (Feb 2025).
Read more about the project here.
12 Attempts [to collapse my infinity] (2024)
Video (digital) & photography (medium format) · 20:23 · UK · English
A self-portrait shoot by the artist produces 12 non-binary somatic ‘expressions’. Alongside a process video, a stereoscopic Viewmaster presents the artificially-extended images to challenge the viewer and camera’s ability to perceive virtual space and queer embodiment.
Read more about the project here.
Call On Me, Me, Me (2024)
3-channel Video (16mm and iPhone) & 5-channel Audio · 33:30 · UK · English
16mm screendance ‘re-enactments’, a grandfather’s journal, and three interviews between the artist and their father explore the absences and assonances that mark their biographies and radically different embodiments of masculinity.
Read more about the project here.
Today I Saved the World (2023)
Single-channel video composite (digital) & preserved cake · 16:18 · Germany · English
Today I Saved the World situates the audience within a queasy inner monologue of personal climate commitments as the artist eats a green cake. Compositing two video channels on top of each other, the work collapses the space between consumer and consumed, troubling the boundaries between climate action, media narratives, and personal identity. What remains of the cake from the original performance has been preserved in resin as part of the installation.
Read more about the project here.
Commute (2022)
4-channel video (digital) & ambisonic audio · 27:58 · Germany · English
Two commuters sharing a mysterious queer entanglement navigate the haunted tunnels of the Berlin metro system during the 2020 Covid lockdowns. Exploring the alienation and vulnerability of this highly virtual moment, Commute mixes docu-fiction with music video to create an immersive and emotional urban trip.
Made in collaboration with Viewfinder.
Read more about the project here.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:
On Photography, by Susan Sontag
Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard
Parables for the Virtual, by Brian Massumi
Cyberfeminist Index, by Mindy Seu
Glitch Feminism, by Legacy Russel