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Unsung

in collaboration iwth Nadia Botello

2016, 4-channel video and audio installation with audio transducers, corrugated steel and fog machines

Vocalists:
Fatima Adamu
Melissa Dunphy
Matré Grant
Maria Murphy

Excerpt of catalog essay from (A Guide to the Stranger or) Pocket Companion for Unsung by Kelsey Halliday Johnson

....For Unsung, there was plenty of research to be done but the duo had no media archives to sift through, or an original source film to reposition. Here, the women have been rendered invisible and unknowable by time, and so they enlisted four women to become the voices and bodies of the female characters that were developed...

...The trio's collaborative order of operations lead the content they unearthed away from a highly literal or factual interpretation of the narratives. Instead, the resulting pop-up installation transmuted these stories into an uncanny experience that could be more deeply personal for the contemporary viewer. That critical distancing from the original story accompanied by an indulgence in the deeply captivating potential of multi-sensory immersion within an unexpected place, more poignantly evokes questions of what these women represent and of spaces we perhaps deeply misunderstand. The rough surface of the underpass obscured the full form of the figurative projections when not seen from straight on, adding an additionally fragile quality to the permanence of these stories and the installation. Suib elaborated on their thinking further asking, “Typically we think of the past haunting the present, but we’re considering how we might haunt the past from our present moment.” 

In its speculative revisitation of a lost history, Unsung speaks to the inherent power of testimony through its performance. The female figures were projected at slightly over life scale confronting the viewer on the street while visibly speaking, but at most times inaudible. This act of address, that reads from their body language as somewhere between persona confession and directed monologue, intermixes the pathos of the personal with the trauma of the social. It smartly probes how media arts might further embody histories of social marginalization and reinvent discourses of collective memory, eschewing the unfortunat accidents of re-victimizing individuals through representation. Time travel has become a ironic impossibility for the nature of contemporary
media projects like this and one shoul argue that desire for time travel to the past is more emotionally and politically charged tha aspirations for the future. However, Unsung bucks any assumption for a desired virtual window onto the past with the untheatrical contemporary dress of the female figures. The visitor's bodily experience further grounded the project in the present through the use of fo and bodily liveness of Botello's sonified objects.