This video installation's called The City of Ladies, it's by Sydney artist Zanny Begg, working with a Paris-based filmmaker, an Australian woman called Elise McLeod. Zanny, over recent years, has been making these films that sort of sit between documentary and drama, made in a form of collaboration with the groups of people whose experiences she's trying to draw out in the films. So, she's made films with young men in youth detention, or particular migrant groups in Western Sydney, usually using some kind of fictional template through which they can express something about themselves. The films oscillate in this really interesting space.

In this film, Zanny and Elise have worked in Paris. They put out a call for young women, primarily activists working in social justice movements, who might be interested in actually making a film, or participating in a film that speaks something of, or to, their life experiences, and a lot of them are migrant women. As Elise works as an actor trainer for feature films, they undertook acting workshops and drama workshops as part of this reciprocal relationship about giving skills and experience back into this group of women.

The work uses as its template, or as an inspiration, a 1402 novel, The Book of the City of Ladies written by an Italian author, Christine de Pizan, who was based in France, and it's really considered one of the first, if not the first, feminist novel. In this book, the author imagines a city built to, and drawing upon, the qualities of women, and particularly important women in history to that point. It's this kind of utopian idea of a city of and for women.

Working with this text as a sort of influence, or a template, Zanny has actually developed a series of scripts, a series of narratives, a series of exchanges amongst the women, and she's also brought into the workshop situation a number of important feminist figures, including philosophers, who come and either are interviewed in the film, or come and talk to the young women involved in the film.

They compiled a huge amount of footage of these women in interior situations, or walking around housing estates, or in the city of Paris, performing, dancing, singing, speaking with each other, but rather than make a narrative film that has a beginning, middle, and end, a sort of arc, they've taken a series of sections and I think there's something like 52 sections, scenes, whatever you want to call them, seven of which are quite long, so they're 8, 10, 11 minutes long.

They've put this through a computer algorithm, that's been written especially for them. And so every time you come into the installation, every 20 minutes a new film will be shown, and it will be a different sequencing of scenes that they've shot. There's 52 scenes, I think that's the right number. They'll take one of the seven longer ones, as the core of that, and the computer will select a number of others and arrange them around that core, and you'll get a 20 minute film, and it'll be different every time. In fact, there's over 300,000 permutations of the work. So, you get this constant play of different relationships between the women that are being filmed, and their stories. It has this complexity and richness that's ever-evolving, and they wanted to really give that sense of that complexity, rather than simply a film that you could watch over and over again and get a sense of progression in these women's lives, which is really not what this work is about.