RECORD, TRANSCRIBE, POST: INSTAGRAM FILM

3 MAY 2020

In late Spring 2020 I was invited to take over the Instagram account of the Kunsthaus Centre d’Art Pasquart (now KBCB) in Biel/ Bienne, Switzerland. The gallery itself had been closed for an indefinite period, along with almost everything else during what we now think of as the first wave of the COVID-19 global pandemic. I decided to use my phone to record and post a short video on the hour, every hour; to build a record of a day that would be, as André Breton once said of his own experimental writing, like a door ‘left ajar’ until completed. That is not to say there was no structure for the 24-hour piece – I had planned very carefully where I would be filming at each hour. Aside from two instances of music added from an external source, however, the actual content was left open to chance. For each 60-second post I very quickly wrote a caption – time was of the essence  – collaging my own writing with snippets from books, emails, text messages and the day’s news from the radio. On my night walks I caught bells ringing from the clocks of shuttered churches and public announcements at deserted railway stations. My intention was to displace the “I” wherever possible – to cast doubt on who’s actually doing the speaking(or the walking, or the filming).

I had planned to make this piece on 26 April 2020, but my cat died very suddenly on the 21st. I was so grief-stricken that I postponed everything until the following week. Even then I could barely speak about him. This brings me to a note about the quality of sound in the recordings. Many consist of me reading from my own jottings in response to the day’s events as they unfolded and when I listen to them now, my voice sounds strange to me, but reflective of my sadness and the situation we were in during those months of lockdown. I was anxious about the pandemic, and about my own ambition. Having started the day declaring boldly that I was going to do it, I worried I would not have the stamina, sufficient network coverage or a good-enough phone battery to see it through. On top of all that, I knew that I was relying on some sort of ‘essential serendipity’. For instance, while filming at an otherwise deserted

Liverpool Street Station, I knew when something ‘lucky’ happened: a person walked into frame.

The piece now exists as a film, made up of the 24 short video posts, available at: vimeo.com/422379527.

For on online version of this project (with the original Instagram captions) please see: RECORD, TRANSCRIBE, POST: 24 HOURS IN LOCKED-DOWN LONDON.,MAY 3rd 2020

This could all have remained on Instagram alone, but as our distance from that particular time grows, I feel more strongly the need to preserve something of it.