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TOM SKIPP – FILM WORKS – STORMWATER
FILM DETAILS
Videotriptych (three screens). Colour. HD video
Sound: Stereo.
Filmed at the underground Storm Water Deposit at Arroyofresno, Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 2009.
Project awarded by Matadero Madrid, Ayudas a la creación
Production: My Oscillating Identity and Tom Skipp.
CAST
Soprano: Laura Fernández Alcalde
Countertenor: Angel Chirinos
Tenor:
Javier Jacome
Choir: La Trova
Direction, photography, editing: Tom Skipp
Sound: Marcel Garbi
Music: "Weep, O Mine Eyes", John Bennet,
"O Virgo Splendens", Llibre Vermell
Stills photography: Gonzalo de la Serna
RIGHTS
Write to: Tom Wisdom estrellasonora@gmail.com
THE ACTION
The piece, a video triptych, was filmed inside the biggest stormwater reservoir in Europe just before it was opened, filled with water and closed to the public forever. Three screens for three singers who perform inside this underground industrial architecture. The two men (a tenor and countertenor) sing separately, performing a song from the earliest known manuscript of Catalonian music called "O Virgo Splendens" . Their voices summon the third singer, a soprano, who appears inside the water tunnel carrying a suitcase. She stops inside the dark tunnel and sings back to the men until finally their voices mesh together in a three part harmony. She progresses upwards, following the route of the stormwater, towards the monumental area where the water is filtered. And after a ceremonial encounter with the men she is accompanied to the exit. A choir dressed as workers sings "Weep oh mine eyes", the stormwater is released and she walks out to the surface and the light.
STILLS GALLERY
MAKING THE FILM
©Gonzalo de la Serna
TRAILER
Trailer unavailable
ABOUT THE TEXT AND MUSIC
O Virgo Splendens
"O Virgo splendens, hic in monte celso
Miraculis serrato fulgentibus ubique,
Quem fideles conscendunt universi.
Eia pietatis oculo placato
Cerne ligatus fune peccatorum
Ne infernorum ictibus graventur
Sed cum beatis tua prece vocentur." from the Llibre Vermell
Weep O Mine Eyes
"Weep, o mine eyes and cease not,
alas, these your spring tides methinks increase not.
O when begin you to swell so high
that I may drown me in you?" by John Bennet
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
"Stormwater" explores the intense transience of human existence in a timeless manmade structure. It concurrently employs literalness and metaphor... at the same time depicting the journey of a city's stormwater -as it flows through a tunnel, is channeled into an underground reservoir, to finally be pumped to the surface- and the human life cycle from birth to death. The work aims to function as a springboard for the viewer's interpretative faculties, seeking to broaden signification. The medium is not coincidental, everything has been composed for a video triptych. Three voices and three screens which join together at one point to form a huge panoramic canvas portraying the scale of the underground architecture. The use of the triptych recreates a special 'aura' for the artwork which seemed lost or unattainable for video.
SHORT BIOGRAPHIES
(Director) Tom Skipp, England 1965, trained at the Arts Educational School in the Barbican, London. He graduated in Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick. He toured Europe as a performer and director of plays by Shakespeare, Wedekind, Barnes, etc. Since 1990 he has lived and worked in Spain. In 1996, he organised an exhibition about the Polish theatre director Tadeusz Kantor in Madrid (Fundación Telefonica) and Barcelona (Fundación Caixa de Catalunya). In 2005, he co-curated the Real Spanish Art exhibition at the Nagasaki Prefectural Museum of Art.
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