Low Murmur
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2020
Performance video & soundscape, 14m41s This video work was inspired by and created during my time in lockdown in SE London (Old Kent Road), without access to wild nature spaces and unable to leave the local area. During my daily walks, I became increasingly observant of and developed a feeling of affinity with the weeds & low-lying plants that permeate through the cracks of Southeast London’s pavement, brick walls & rooftops. Seeing their existence, persistence & survival as metaphor for marginalised resistance to the persistent forces of capitalist uprooting & erasure. This became a prompt for visual & sonic investigation into how merging technological tools & East Asian ecological thinking rooted in Taoist practices, can amalgamate into a space of post-digital transcendence from these conditions — recomposing one’s immediate reality into a sensory landscape of meditation and healing. The footage was taken from these lockdown walks and discovery of overgrown unoccupied buildings in the area. Filming the vibrant plant surfaces & textures permeating monotone concrete, in digital post-production the plants become green screen and gateway to a performative underlayer interweaving gestural movement. Accompanied by a generative soundscape of rain, water dripping, distorted construction rumbling & electronica… the video departs from dreary urban construction waste conditions into a dreamy post-digital meditation garden & moving image performance. Curatorial text by Nikos Akritidis Exhibitions: 12 September 2020: Ruderal Consciousness, hARTSlane Gallery (London) Credits: Performance: Monica Tolia Filming: Monica Tolia, with assistance from Phoenix Tanner & Sam Schmitt Editing: Monica Tolia Sound composition: Monica Tolia |
Installation view at hARTSlane Gallery
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SPATIAL SOUND COMPOSITION
LISTEN WITH HEADPHONES!