Alberta Whittle
Video ( 4K, 2K and HD), Stereo sound, 32 mins, 2020
Sound Design and Sound Mix by Richy Carey
Filmed across Barbados, South Africa and the United Kingdom, RESET charts a polyphonic journey, woven together through contributions by writers, performers, and musicians, whom Alberta refers to as her accomplices. Informed by the writings of queer theorist, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the work interweaves gothic imagery, fears of contagion, xenophobia and the ensuing moral panic that often follows such anxieties. Produced at the height of lockdown and responding to the immediate context of the Black Lives Matter movement, the global pandemic and climate emergency the film is a call to action – a demand – to face and heal injustices and cultivate hope in hostile environments strikes the balance between grief and reflection, empathy and desire.
RESET is the second film I made with Alberta, with the sound design is woven into Yves B. Golden‘s musical score. The soundscape is composed of layers of room tones that melt into chords, twists of air that are at once steam and snakes and bursts of weather, and clouds of birdsong washing against waves of shorelines.
RESET was the outcome of the Frieze Artist Award, co-produced and co-commissioned by Forma and Frieze.