I’m Happy You’re here
A couple of months ago I attended Beldina Odenyo’ postmortum Tero Buru. In the final moments of the piece Beldina’s voice played through the theatre and then everyone in the audience rose, except for two. The woman next to me sat crying and I sat with her and we held each other. A few minutes later she confided that Beldina was her sister, and that was her first time hearing her sisters voice since her passing two years prior. As an artist whose work has centered around grief for the past 2 years, the power of the voice struck me.
So I chose to capture my families Christmas using a voice recorder and collected 30 hours of sonic memories.
Personally, this was a gift. When I moved back to Scotland, thousands of miles from the comforting intimacy of my family home, I found myself listening to these memories to go to sleep. Artistically, it was a challenge, how could I transform these mundane conversations into something politically relevant, let alone engaging for my audience.
The answer, as it so often does, appeared in the making. By immersing, comforting, myself in the recorded voice, I was isolating myself. Have you done that before, sacrificed connection for comfort? Is sacrifice the right word? I needed to explore. I chose to create a world that would extend the power of my headphones, I decided to immerse my audience in these memories. So together we could explore the intimacy of isolation and the the isolation of intimacy in the digital age.
