Roll Call (2018)

pf, tape, video
16 minutes

Written for Heloisa Amaral with funding from Norwegian Arts. Premiered at the Almost Connect Festival, Oslo in 2018.

“I realise that making in prose a decent pattern out of what happens to come your way is a preoccupation, which, in a sense, has no higher ambitions than, for a brief moment in time, to rescue something out of that stream of history that keeps rushing past.”
[W.G.Sebald]

The subject of the piece is a panoramic photograph of the pupils and teachers of a boys’ school in Romford, Essex made in 1946. The work explores notions of biography, memory and nostalgia and attempts to forge an audio-visual music using the image itself, speculations concerning the lives of the people in the shot, and a sonic space spun out of field recording representing the school playing-field on which this photograph was taken.