Collaborations | Emma Willemse conceptual artist

Richmond Loop

A multimedia response to an artists’ residency in the town Richmond, The Great Karoo, South Africa

A collaborative project between

New music composer Michael Blake

and

Conceptual artist Emma Willemse

Richmond Loop (still) (2023) multimedia video, 16,54 min

Artist’s statement

“What can a place reveal? … A place cannot be interrogated. The landscape is mute” (Wasserman: 165). This is the question Tina Wasserman asks when confronted by the experimental film Cooperation of parts by Daniel Eisenberg, in which he journeys to Europe to witness and record the places that signify his parents’ experience of the Nazi Holocaust.

In the case of Richmond Loop, the quest of the artists was to ask what a place could reveal about the people inhabiting a space, and, more importantly, how to do this without depicting people.

The New Music composer Michael Blake and the conceptual artist Emma Willemse visited Modern Art Projects South Africa (MAPSA) in Richmond for a 14 day residency in October 2021. For the creative work at the residency, they set themselves the task of collecting at least 10 visual and sound fragments each day during their walks through the town. Michael collected sounds from the area with his Zoom recorder while Emma collected visual fragments of overlooked details with her cell-phone camera. They consider these recordings as site-specific data which speaks of a place called Richmond. Each collected fragment was catalogued according to date and time, as well as located on a map of Richmond.

The outcome of this collaboration is an integrated sound and visual collage constructed in the following way: Michael composed a sound collage with a duration of 15 minutes, by layering the sounds that he found in the streets of Richmond. The structure of the sounds follow a circular walk in the town, each sound corresponds with a specific site. Some of these sounds include the ever present traffic noise from the N1 highway, birds chirping, dogs barking, human voices of residents on a Friday evening, the bells of the local NG Church, the sweeping sounds of brooms, the clanking sounds of a lopsided election poster striking its metal pole. The entire walk of sounds is framed with a slow motion version of a poignant hymn, sung on a Sunday morning in the local evangelical church, arranged for a string quartet and then looped.

In creating this structure, Michael intended a multiple play on the word ‘loop’, which is the Afrikaans (the language predominantly spoken in Richmond) word for ‘walk’. ‘Loop’ also references the circular structure of the walk, the looped structure of the sound piece as well as the main street of Richmond, Loop Street.

With this soundtrack as basis, Emma constructed a visual collage following the sound collage. By layering her found images and short videos in the same way colours and brush strokes are layered in a painting, she loosely followed the same walk as the sound collage with images found at the same sites as the sounds, and following the same looped structure as the sound piece. Some of the overlooked details include the different layers of peeling paint on a wall, the cracks in the tiles on the veranda of the old age home, the marks made by nails on the trunk of a blue gum tree, traces of paint on a wooden fence and spilled on a sidewalk, minute objects on a trash heap, some residue of text scratched out of a corrugated iron gate, a stain on an antique dress in the museum, shadows of a willow tree moving on a whitewashed wall.

The combined collaboration references painting both in structure and in the making process.

By using his sound editing software as a canvas akin to a map with events placed in it – an audiovisual collage - Blake created a layered and haunting record of sounds heard on site. He says:

“I have been using ProTools® for more than a decade as recording software: a desktop studio for sound editing and mixing. When I was invited to make a piece for an electronic music project in 2013 with the theme of birds, to be broadcast in public venues and issued on a CD, I had the idea of treating ProTools literally as a canvass. Since my approach to composition usually involves using, among other things, found sounds and chance methods, I could ‘drop’ sounds onto the screen and try them out, then move them about, transform them electronically if necessary, and so on. That piece was Morija Birdscape with Luigi Russolo which I made in 2013, and in the same year I composed Ukukhalisa Umrhubhe for the bow player Mantombi Matotiyana and electronic soundtrack, commissioned by the Festival d’Automne à Paris.

Then five years later I composed Displaced: 101 Ways to Long for a Home for keyboard player and foundsoundtrack, a 26-minute response to Emma Willemse’s collection of 101 artist books with the same title. Still using the studio software as a canvass, I included recordings made in Emma’s studio of her ‘playing’ the books, along with many other found sounds. The visual element in all these pieces is somewhat akin to a map with events placed in it – an audiovisual collage - and in the case of Richmond Loop, it actually followed the map of the town, placing sounds at the locations where they were found, though the audio map proceeds by design from left to right.”

Richmond Loop Canvas (Michael Blake, Saint-Leger-Magnazeix, 2023)

While Willemse’s detailed found images often reference paint remnants (such as peeling paint on walls or paint splashed on a side-walk), it is in the layering of alternating states of opacity during the video editing process that the act of painting and its indexical capacities are simulated.

Richmond Loop Visual Still (Emma Willemse, 2023)

Much in the same way that we can sense the actions of the body of the painter through the gestural energy of the marks on the canvas (think of Pollock’s action paintings), we can divine the way of life of the people of Richmond through the traces and remnants left behind, recorded visually and through the sound of their voices and actions. In this way, Richmond Loop itself becomes a site-specific trace, a voice alluding to the meanings attached to place by the inhabitants of a small town on the edge of the national highway linking the South and North of South Africa.

Richmond Loop Visual Still (Emma Willemse, 2023)

Indeed, the landscape is not mute, but can be “ … investigated and examined, … to metonymically stand in for an event and, at the same time, to reveal its imperviousness” (Wasserman, 165).

Source

Wasserman, Tina, Constructing the Image of Postmemory in: the image and the witness edited by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (Wallflower Press, London, 2007), 165.