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Ghost Story
Video with sound, 16:00 duration, 2023
A group of artists embark on a collaborative journey of healing over the course of a year, pulling apart and collaging fragments from Bach’s Chaconne while meditating on ghostly layering of story.
A crankie theatre is a simple device: two scrolls are mounted on dowels in a box, one face of which has been cut away; as one dowel is turned the material on the other scroll pays out; a story unfolds in our seeing. In this crankie theatre, the story is the substrate — we see no picture, but rather texture: swatches of dyed cloth (shirts? there are pockets) rudely sewn together to make a bolt, the sections of which unfurl/refurl continuously in our sight. What story is woven into the fabric of these shirts? Behind the crankie theatre we see a person, the operator of the device: is he (are they a he?) the teller of this story? A treble voice begins to speak (whose voice?): “She was married, and she was married; I’m gonna tell you a ghost story.” Now there are other voices, treble and bass; they sing a clumsy tune. As the voices speak — or sing, or tell — the crankie theatre transforms: a filmic/photographic narrative is now unfolding. In text, image, and music, a set of characters (I/you; he/she/they) haunts one another, as versions of each other past and future, even as these characters also accompany one another on the way. She is him; we are them; you are me.
Sound, script, and video by THIRTYMINUTES with Luke Hathaway
A group of artists embark on a collaborative journey of healing over the course of a year, pulling apart and collaging fragments from Bach’s Chaconne while meditating on ghostly layering of story.
A crankie theatre is a simple device: two scrolls are mounted on dowels in a box, one face of which has been cut away; as one dowel is turned the material on the other scroll pays out; a story unfolds in our seeing. In this crankie theatre, the story is the substrate — we see no picture, but rather texture: swatches of dyed cloth (shirts? there are pockets) rudely sewn together to make a bolt, the sections of which unfurl/refurl continuously in our sight. What story is woven into the fabric of these shirts? Behind the crankie theatre we see a person, the operator of the device: is he (are they a he?) the teller of this story? A treble voice begins to speak (whose voice?): “She was married, and she was married; I’m gonna tell you a ghost story.” Now there are other voices, treble and bass; they sing a clumsy tune. As the voices speak — or sing, or tell — the crankie theatre transforms: a filmic/photographic narrative is now unfolding. In text, image, and music, a set of characters (I/you; he/she/they) haunts one another, as versions of each other past and future, even as these characters also accompany one another on the way. She is him; we are them; you are me.
Sound, script, and video by THIRTYMINUTES with Luke Hathaway
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