16 refrigerators, internal workings removed; wood substructure for seat backs, carpeting, upholstery foam, fabric, pigmented wax, light bulbs modified for LED/battery operation; Recorded songs, computer interface for playback, eight Bluetooth speakers
Weston Art Gallery installation: White vinyl floor covering, white fabric on walls and ceilings, custom-built benches, fluorescent lighting, frosted vinyl on windows and glass doors
Requiem is a memorial to victims of genocide, massacres, and warfare, and to persons who have suffered from social and economic injustice and exploitation. It merges the mundane and discarded—used refrigerators reconfigured as coffin-like sculpture—with live and recorded a cappella performance of ancient, classical, and contemporary songs-without-words. The installation dovetails visual and aural elements in a totality that is simultaneously startling, destabilizing, and moving.
This project originated organically as I read in 2014 about the exhumation of hundreds of victims of the Srebrenica Massacre, about deaths from the Ebola epidemic, and about other contemporary mass killings and losses of life. How does an artist respond to these atrocities, I wondered, and without being didactic or clichéd? It dawned on me that by turning apartment-sized refrigerators I had held on to since 1989 on their backs, they could read as coffin-like objects. The fridges, I imagined, could be arranged in an orderly fashion informed by photos of hundreds of coffins holding bodies exhumed in Srebrenica or in loose rows like the shallow, hasty burials of the Ebola epidemic. A trip through Guinea, West Africa, in 2005 drove home the degree to which people in that third-world country make inventive use of every available resource. Funnels made of tin from cans of New Zealand “Swiss Miss” powdered milk and buckets fashioned from truck inner tubes hang in my kitchen as a reminder. Would it be so far-fetched to consider using a non-working refrigerator as a casket?
The interiors of the refrigerators were refashioned as lined coffins in this sprit. Their open bottoms (now ends) were filled with pigmented wax in a range of intense reds, oranges, pinks, and greens that jumped out at me from photographs of hazmat suits and gloves worn by Ebola workers. And though the refrigerators no longer work, the history of their original use could be resonant in the context of caring for dead bodies.
Photographs of the Srebrenica coffins housed before re-burial in large mundane spaces led me to envision the installation in non-conventional, raw spaces. For this initial presentation I worked with Dennis Harrington, Director of the Weston Art Gallery, and his excellent crew to radically transform the main exhibition space. Preparators laid white vinyl over the parquet floors and covered the walls and ceiling with fine-grained white canvas. We replaced warm tungsten lighting with stark fluorescents. Custom white benches ringed the room. Although this solution was 180° different from my initial vision for the work, the stark envelope worked very well by upending any preconceptions gallery goers may have had based on previous exhibitions in the space and by making the objects float, in a way, in a sea of white.
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Requiem is the first time I have incorporated vocal performance in an installation.
I knew from the time I conceived the work that female performers would sing a cappella songs without words. I wanted no lyrics, no compositions for which viewers might recall the words. My initial thought was to adapt instrumental works as solo vocalise conveying pure sound, pure human emotion. These include pieces by classical and contemporary composers and a traditional Mongolian “Camel Coaxing” song, used to encourage bonding between orphaned calves and an adoptive mother. The sole group piece is a collaborative improvisation based loosely on African-American church invocations and on the orchestrated wailing produced by the professional mourners of Sardinia.
My residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, January–February 2016, expanded both the context for the work and the selection of music. The residency center is in the centuries-old Marais district, which was once the Jewish ghetto. The Mémorial de la Shoah is across the street, and there are numerous signs marking buildings from which persons, including school children, were taken by the Nazis. Although my project originated in response to more recent civilian massacres, I came to understand that it could, and must, be resonant as well in the context of the Holocaust and earlier genocides. An Armenian tenor currently living in Paris made me aware that the word “genocide” was coined in response the mass killing of Armenians that began in 1915. As a result, the first song after an invocation (by Baltimore composer Judah Adashi) is a piece by the major Armenian composer Komitas. In Paris I became aware as well of the Japanese composer Takako Yoshida and adapted one of her 100 Prayers, a suite of minimal tone poems written following the bombing of Hiroshima. And by connecting with resident musicians at Cité des Arts, I commissioned three composers (Finnish, Peruvian, and American) to write vocalise. A fourth commissioned work is by Columbus, OH, composer Jacob Reed, whose piece is written in tonalities that recall ancient Hebrew music.
Kristina MacMullen, then an Associate Professor in the Ohio State University School of Music (and currently a Professor of Choral Studies at University of North Texas), assisted me with the final selection of songs and recruited four voice students to join four women from Columbus to perform the 12 works. Mark Rubenstein, Audio Engineer at the OSU School of Music, recorded and engineered the music and the Bluetooth playback.
At the opening, the songs without words were “performed” by the objects with sound coming from the Bluetooth speakers audible through white speaker cloth on eight closed refrigerators. Viewers sat on the benches around the room, cell phones were silenced, the performance proceeded as if it were live with no interruptions, no talking, no movement—only rapt, reverent attention. This is also how the 35-minute cycle of recordings was heard during regular gallery hours.
On March 18, 2018, the vocalists performed the songs live. The performers were in place before the gallery doors were opened, and an audience of more than 100 seated themselves on the benches that lined the perimeter of the gallery. In both the recorded and live performances, the songs were heard one at a time with several seconds of silence between the numbers. A complete list of the songs, composers, and performers appears in the credits at the end of the video documentation embedded here.
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No one could have predicted that a week shy of two years from the date of the live performance the World Health Organization made the assessment that COVID-19 could be be characterized as a pandemic. In the wake of the nearly three million deaths* worldwide from the virus, Requiem has added resonance. I am seeking opportunities for future presentations, ideally in non-traditional art venues that in themselves provide a foil for the enigmatic objects and transcendent music.
*(2.72 mil. March 22, 2021)
