How do we discuss difficulties while keeping in tune? Under soil & skin (US&S) aims to re-imagine troubled ecologies through ruptured song. Working with the premise of a broken chord, a fractured composition is performed with a disfigured cello for the fire-damaged forests of the Blue Mountains. It may be read through a lens of colonisation, feminism, isolation, phenomenology, coexistence, trauma, loss and life cycles. This engagement with the landscape positions art as a navigational tool to work through dissonance and to find the points at which harmony sits, strikes or sings.
“Under Soil & Skin presents the work of art as a constructed, conceptual undertaking, and raises questions about its subsequent relationship to the natural world. It poses the problem of how a thing so seemingly out of kilter with the realities and rhythms of nature might establish harmony between or within them … it invites the viewer to consider how the art object, in its intentionality, might be well placed to communicate both the conditions of its own making and those of the world it exists within … ” — Elyssia Bugg
4min 30sec
DoP: Gene Alberts
Score: Matthijs van Dijk
Audio design: Simon Ratcliffe
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To view the floor sheet click here.
STRAY VOLTAGE presents a discursive program of critically engaged moving image works focusing on experimental narrative-driven practices, led by Katie Paine and Aaron Rees.