Anne Talentire

Interview by William Furlong

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 18 Numbers 3 & 4, 1999

Transcript

William Furlong: Anne Talentire, I’ve looked at your piece at Nuova Icona called ‘Instances’; could you start by describing its elements?

Anne Talentire: There are three elements in the work. There’s a video projection which depicts a scene at the edge of the city at dawn, and a video monitor on the floor which has an hour-long tape of video performances and there is also light box which has one still image on it. So there are three parts to the work.

WF: How do the components fit together because they are physically in different parts of the gallery?

AT: There is a relationship between the three; the dawn image is the light rising in the morning, which takes approximately thirty one minutes. I was thinking about the world beyond that specific scene; what was going on in the city? As the sound gets louder one begins to hear what is invisible to us but nevertheless there; people going to work or coming home from work. The video performances were thinking about the idea of work; work as an artist but also work by people who are perhaps disenfranchised, who don’t necessarily get recognised for what they do, immigrant workers, low paid workers and people who work at night. So there is an implication of some relationship between those two. The other image was actually taken from another work that I did in Dublin with my collaborator John Seth, which was an image of me listening to a wall, and it was an instant taken from that particular work.

WF: The works seem to focus on the middle ground, it’s neither night nor day, it’s strangely disquieting. It’s a strange hinterland that is usually overlooked, but it’s very haunting in the way you’ve presented it.

AT: I suppose yes. I can relate to what you’re saying in terms of a kind of foreshortening of experience, working within a very close register. The idea of concentrating on something very small or overlooked I find extremely interesting; the fact that we sleep through the dawn and yet it’s potentially epic; the fact that we may take in stimuli or information through our sleep which we are not aware of. One often dreams most vividly in the morning, if you wake up and then go back to sleep again. I’m very interested in the richness and in the potential in those overlooked aspects of our experience. We live in an age where most of our experience is spectacularised in one way or another. Whilst I’m particularly interested in noise and perhaps taking a moment to stand completely still and pay attention to what is generally overlooked, which is something I feel passionately about; how sections of society become overlooked. I didn’t particularly want to do a work in Venice on such a quiet register. I thought it was probably very risky, but I didn’t really have any choice. Originally I was quite interested in trying to perhaps use the gallery as a base and then make work that would emanate from it; much more event based, which is what I do a lot. Perhaps it was the overwhelming sense of being exposed within that kind of context that threw me back into some place in myself, that brought that work into being. I find that really interesting.

WF: It’s interesting that our gaze is more often than not appropriated by the spectacular. It’s particularly interesting to experience this work in Venice because everywhere you go there is a spectacular gaze. It’s another thing I wanted you to talk about, this whole idea of the context of Venice.

AT: Yes, I was very aware of the contrast between the splendour of the city of Venice and the anonymity of the image that I was working with.

WF: Can you say any more about how the work is affected by the location of Venice?

AT: What was surprising was that when you come off the boat to go into the Irish Pavilion you would have been saturated with the romantic sounds of the water and the chatter. You then go into the gallery and hear intermittent sounds from the performances which would be perhaps me treading on broken glass or scraping a floor or hammering a nail, which could have been mistaken for somebody working in the house; literally banging a wall or something like that. Then you would hear the birds of the dawn and so there was a moment of disorientation where it was quite possible that those sounds could have been part of everyday life in Venice. It was only when you saw the images, particularly the image of the dawn and the edge of a city, that the fracture took place in the work and that, I think, was the moment when people would either stay or they wouldn’t. Real time is something I work with a lot, it’s something I value and it’s also very risky, very difficult to work with, as you know. I wanted to explore what it’s like to subject oneself to reliving time in real time. I’m thinking of the people who work at night, in that odd space, betwixt and between, neither here neither there. It’s rich.