Annea Lockwood, Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon – History of the Present & On Fractured Ground
Saturday, 19 September⋅9:00 – 9:45am
This morning at 9am – An audio work comprising two intertwined pieces made by writer Maria Fusco, artist-filmmaker Margaret Salmon and composer Annea Lockwood – ‘History of the Present’ & ‘On Fractured Ground.’
‘On Fractured Ground’ is derived from material originally recorded for the soundtrack of ‘History of the Present’. Working together in Belfast, Annea Lockwood, Pedro Rebelo and Georgios Varoutsos made extensive recordings of the city’s ‘peace lines’, the dozens of walls erected since the beginning of the Troubles in the late 1960s to separate Catholic and Protestant areas of the city. Struck by the immensity of these barriers and ‘the brutal way they sever neighbourhoods’, Lockwood and her collaborators focused not on the sound environment of the city, but on the walls themselves, playing them as gigantic resonant instruments, using their hands, and objects such as stones and leaves.
‘History of the Present Process Conversation’ – a longitudinal record of process conversations between Maria Fusco, Annea Lockwood and Margaret Salmon during the making of the film History of the Present.
‘History of the Present’ (2023) is a feminist experimental opera-film co-directed by Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon with new music by Annea Lockwood. This intersectional, intergenerational feminist work forefronts working-class women’s voices to ask: who has the right to speak, and in what way? Layering sociological, cultural, and political themes from the recent history of Northern Ireland, the work exercises voice, breath and field-recording composition through a range of film techniques and operatic articulations, to amplify marginalised stories. Made on 35mm and video in the streets of Belfast, the Ulster Museum and the Royal Opera House in London, History of the Present observes how defensive architecture defines movement to enforce intersectional histories and identities within daily experiences in conflict and post-conflict zones on an international level.
http://mariafusco.net
https://www.annealockwood.com
https://www.margaretsalmon.info