MARLINA READ & KATELYN CLARK
’SONGS OF SIBYLS’
1 JUNE – 24 JUNE, 2017
Songs of Sibyls, 2017, Installation shot. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: In the gallery there are two television screens on either side of the room. The one on the left has a close-up still of green leaves, with the one on the right a still of someone in a grey top planting something in the ground. There is also a white bench in between both the screens.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Song of Sibyls was a collaborative and experimental sound and video adaptation of the Gregorian chant El Cant de la Sibilla, about a prophetess and the apocalypse. El Cant de la Sibilla originates from ancient Grecian myths of the Sibyls, female oracles who took divine inspiration and prophesied at holy sites. It appeared in European Christian spiritual traditions in the 10th century, due to the similarity in the story to the biblical concept of the final judgment. The music has many variations, incorporating traditions of Gregorian chant, troubadour poetry, and Catalan ritual.
Song of Sibyls comprised two intertwined parts—a three-channel video installation elucidated the lyrical meaning of the song through three aspects—landscape, buildings and people. Presented in long shots, the imagery explored the climate, landscape, physicality and aesthetics of a ‘hypothetical future/present’, calling back to the metaphysical poetic fiction and ritualistic polyphonic styles of the chant— forests at twilight thrive silently; abandoned and empty buildings stand, no longer required by people; a group of women perform ‘survival’ tasks in suburban surrounds—moving camp, making a fire, collecting water, cooking bread, foraging.
Songs of Sibyls, 2017, Installation shot. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: In the gallery there are two television screens on either side of the room. The one on the left has a wide shot of a bush landscape, with the one on the right a still of a the inside of a decorated garage. There is also a white bench in between both the screens.
This was accompanied by a haunting, improvised soundscape of the organetto—a small portative organ of medieval design—mixed with electronic sounds. The organetto has bellows that are controlled by hand, allowing the instrument to take 'breaths’. The tuning of the pipes can be manipulated, creating micro tunings and heavy beating sounds that can be both heard and felt. Through this process the lyrics of the chant are ‘played’ rather than sung. The prophetess was given ‘voice’ through altered pitch and temperament of the instrument and was reminiscent of ships horns.
The work created a physically immersive experience that speculated on a world marked by solitude, transition and reflection, overturning the annihilation and sorrow foretold in the chant. In reference to the song’s mythical origins we placed women at the centre of this world.
Marlaina Read, 2017.
Songs of Sibyls, 2017, Installation shot. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: In the gallery there are two television screens on either side of the room. The one on the left has a close-up still of green leaves, with the one on the right a still of someone in a black singlet planting something in the ground. There is also a white bench in between both the screens.
Maybe The Apocalypse Is Just What We Need
Women dream their own apocalypses in colours that far outshine the sterility of anything Albrecht Dürer ever depressively foretold. From her 17th-century baroque cloister, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (‘the Phoenix of the Americas’) celebrates the Virgin Mary’s undead assumption into Heaven as the apocalyptic “woman clothed with the sun” in the Book of Revelation; stopping short at the Biblical woman’s delivery of a male tyrant. In the 11th century, Hildegard of Bingen (‘the Sybil of the Rhine’), prophesises the coming of the Antichrist, born from the Church, “who will persecute believing Christians, and who will try to pretend that he is divine by ascending into heaven”, until the Church, represented as a wrecked and bleeding woman’s body, overcomes - her feet “glowing…with a splendor greater than the sun’s”; the evil “son of perdition” prostrate before her.
Hildegard and Juana were both great composers of music and song.
Songs of Sibyls, 2017, Installation shot. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: In the gallery there are three television screens on each point of the room. The one in the middle has a close-up still of green leaves, with the other two not visible to in the photo. There is also a white bench in between the screens.
In Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, Lauren Oya Olamina is living in the end times - all patriarchal theocracy and scorched earth. The collision of this spent planet, its misery, with young Black female corporeal intelligence brings about the Earthseed faith, which starts to grow a new world founded on the constancy and divinity of change. Today, adrienne maree brown of Octavia's Brood writes, “things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered”. The labour of this apocalypse is to “hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil.”
While these women’s visions and their rendering are brilliant and sonorous, they are also always sustained by practices of silence, stillness, and immersion. Hildegard of Bingen refused to move her body until the abbot granted her squad of Benedictine nuns their own monastery where she would write in a secret, sacred script. Sor Juana had divested all her books and lived in silence for three years when she died while nursing her sisters out of a plague that killed thousands in Mexico City in 1695. Voice can be transposed in registers that will never reach the world of men, taking us to secret gardens, crystal-powered technology, and cities of refuge.
Off the troubled coast of Guerrero, Mexico, a ship full of women moors in international waters so that girls can choose life. In the red heart of capital-colonialist Australia, young Indigenous people are building robots. In New York, Toshi Reagon has made The Parable of the Sower an opera.
The organetto is autogestive, its breath coming by the same hand as its sound. The abandoned house is used for shelter from hot winds; its facade is heavy with chokos that feed the camp dogs. Maybe the apocalypse is just what we need.
Ann Deslandes, 2017.