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The desire to stay versus the inevitability of change

The desire to stay... Installation view
The desire to stay... Installation view

The desire to stay... Installation view
The desire to stay... Installation view

The desire to stay... Installation view
The desire to stay... Installation view

The desire to stay... Installation view
The desire to stay... Installation view


Statement

The desire to stay versus the inevitability of change is a sixteen monitor video installation produced in conjunction with the cinematographer Evan Drolet Cook. Sixteen participants were allocated a role from Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Birds. Each was filmed isolated in their own home, watching the film in silence. When their allocated character had a speaking part, the participant read the line aloud from the subtitles on screen.

The filmed participants have varying roles in terms of the amount of speaking they need to do. Those who are speaking the lines of the main characters are active throughout the duration of the film, others are allocated bit-parts and have only a couple of lines to speak within the almost two hours of film-watching.

In the gallery space, the video footage was played on monitors, ordered chronologically by speaking part. The film is recreated for the audience without any visual cues, special effects or sound effects. Without knowing the narrative or the order of the speaking parts, the viewer must actively attempt to follow a dialogue across sixteen monitors, without being able to anticipate where the next voice may come from.