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| Victoria Rance, Firebird, 2022, video still |
Firebird a single channel 4m 25s video with sound composition
Premiered at Platform Projects Athens 2022 with Cable Depot
"For the 10th anniversary of Platforms Project in
Athens, Cable Depot presents ‘Firebird’, a new work by Victoria Rance in
collaboration with Cole Pemberton and performance by Sophie Pemberton.
The work is a single channel 4m25s video with sound composition.
Rance has a history of creating wearable art and using performers to
activate creatures which emerge from a mythological subconscious and
speak to us through form, movement and sound of an ancient past and of
the present plight of the earth. Recalling a forgotten primitive state,
Rance’s work is a visceral reminder that we are of nature and not
separate, that we need to care for the environment we live in by
identifying ourselves as a part of it and the sheer mystery and awe of
life – our own and that of all other living creatures which inhabit the
waters, the earth and the sky.
In ‘Firebird’ we are confronted by a single moving image of a creature
projected in a dark space against a black background, so that it appears
to be a slow swimming, bioluminescent dweller of the deepest oceans,
where sunlight does not penetrate. It is larger than human scale and is
suspended in a dark, borderless, and palpably personal proximity to the
viewer. Together with the accompanying meditative soundscape, composed
by Cole Pemberton (Rance’s son, music and film maker and long time
collaborator), this encounter is pulsating with Rance’s emotional appeal
to her viewers. Rance’s creature is also herself and also something in
all of us frightened by this evolutionary moment we are living through,
with rising sea levels and burning earth. Even a momentary encounter
with ‘Firebird’ leaves a lasting and poignant impression.
More time with the work can reveal a deeper, unconcealed human aspect.
The creature is suddenly no longer swimming – it appears to stand, the
curve of a leg is discernible, then everything again metamorphoses into a
fluid aquatic beast floating off into the dark void. The fish-like
creature’s movements were in fact performed and recorded on the floor by
Rance’s daughter Sophie Pemberton. The body of the creature is a
wearable artwork made from felt by Victoria Rance. What appears as
graceful swimming in unfathomable watery depths, is in fact the
gravity-bound movements of its inner inhabitant – the human inside the
animal (as an obvious obverse to our own animal nature). The burning
flesh of the creature changes its hues from an appearance of
bioluminescence to fire-like flames (something like the aspect of the
earth’s cities burning with electric light when seen at night from the
window of an aeroplane), building like an alarm, like witness to
destruction, then subsiding back into the glow of life in the dark. The
deep places of the oceans are home to an enormous amount of strange
life, which we humans impact without ever witnessing. ‘Firebird’ is like
a call from the depths to us, saying here we are, we are alive, see us,
feel us, we exist and we are connected, we are you."
- Iavor Lubomirov 17 May 2022 cable-depot.com/Platforms-Project-2022
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| Victoria Rance, Firebird, 2022, video still |
