To the microphone, please (with Mrs Soprano)

This film was made in collaboration with artist Rose O’Gallivan: To the microphone please (with Mrs Soprano) contains the dramaturgy of a press release in two languages posing an interview between the artist and an anonymous interviewer. Re-purposing work from a gallery exhibition by O’Gallivan, the film attempts to re-distribute the interview between artist and curator, into two artists re-enacting the interview in a domestic space. The activity takes place working together in one room, and then in the edit. The work forms a collaborative act of documentation and reappraisal of artistic activity.

 “Mrs Soprano refers to the common assumption of the presence of a voice within artworks. The artist is expected to have this ‘voice’ which is often audible in a certain ‘pitch’. The pitch becomes the tone or texture of the artwork whether light, earnest, dry, shrill, sombre. By seeing the film in a variation of different colours, and treating it like the luxury material that it is (a lot like the hand-dyed silk fabric, the film’s material protagonist), a dialogue around presentation is set, encountering things that inherently carry different associations in different tones. In favour of the subtitles having an aesthetic presence, the sound cuts away all the articulated words and keeps the noise and scuffles in-between – everything else is kept ‘low’, leaving audible tones of presence, and evidencing ‘going along with something loose raised to the text’”.

Taken from interview transcript between Holly Antrum and Rose O’Gallivan. Interviewed in 2013 by Regina Barunke.