MEGHAN HO-TONG, MATTY ROODT & LUCIENNE BESTALL

Synopsis

In Chorus, fiction lends to architecture an alternative retelling. Taking as site a modernist Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church) set in the mountains of South Africa, the imagined narrative augments the otherworldly qualities of the structure and its landscape, abstracting it from historical specificity that it might enter broader considerations. In recalling how the many voices of a congregation became autonomous from the bodies that housed them, occupying the interior of the building with their song, sound becomes a synonym for spectre; the voice recast as ghost. Growing more ecstatic in their independence, disembodied femme voices lead the dissent, accumulating in the upper reaches of the spire. By their haunting, the sopranos make apparent the hidden and disavowed alive within the space, resisting the ideologies that shaped it. Architecture becomes score, offering prompts sung by a choir towards the film’s soundscape. Quietly radical in its invocations, Chorus attends to this structure of dominion with novel subtlety; the site a resonating instrument with which to explore the condensed image of both the real and imagined.

Artist Statement:

Acutely aware that the built environment embodies and reproduces ideology, Chorus uses the fictional haunting of a modernist Dutch Reformed church in South Africa, Op-die-berg (1976), to suggest that a sacred building could become a resonating instrument through which to investigate and contest gendered power relationships alive and present in our built world.

The film, co-produced for Museo MAXXI in 2021, takes as site a structure founded on the ideologies of Afrikaner Nationalism. With its sweeping spire dominant over the unyielding landscape, conjuring dual narratives of authority and subservience, and symbols of masculinity and power carried in the architecture – the work seeks to examine possible alternative meanings based on unspoken narratives and overlooked qualities of femininity, sensuality and subtlety.

The framework of haunting raises specters and alters the experience of linear time, the way we separate the past, present and future. It exposes unresolved forms of violence alive and present in the space, speculating on how dissonances and seepages might interfere with constructions of repression and containment. Here, a form of liminal space is produced, understood as a condensed image of historical ideologies and speculative alternate futures; its invocations structuring the possibility of historical transformation.

Sound asserts itself as central to the building’s haunting through a chorus of dissenting femme voices; a deliberate subversion of visual dominance that asks how we might listen to the softer, quieter frequencies carried by land, architecture and place. Using film as research method, the work attempts to bring the viewer into an atmospheric spatial construction of force and meaning and asks them to linger there, in the hope that a more sensual knowledge of space and place might emerge.

Group BIO:

Matty Roodt, Meghan Ho-Tong and Lucienne Bestall live and work in Cape Town, South Africa. An artist, architect and writer (among other things), their collaborative practice extends narrative filmmaking as a research methodology to think through gendered power relationships in the built environment. Chorus is their second film.