Botta e risposta fotografico/musicale tra Christian Marclay e Steve Beresford, in una pubblicazione che rimanda all'inquietante scenario delle strade deserte di Londra nei primi mesi dell'esplosione della pandemia: Call and Response, per la statunitense Siglio.
Known for his ability to locate music and sound in the most unexpected contexts, artist Christian Marclay began photographing the emptied London streets when the world shut down in the spring of 2020. He found the quiet - the absence of all the city sounds - both haunting and peaceful. On his daily walks, he began to imagine that there might be music in the landscape. He snapped a photo of an iron gate adorned with decorative white balls as it reminded him of a musical score. He sent it to his friend, the composer Steve Beresford and asked: “How would this sound on the piano?” Beresford responded with a recording. Over the course of that spring, they connected virtually across the locked-down city: Marclay took more photographs which inspired Beresford to write more music.
In his introduction, Marclay writes, “I realized that all my pictures were of enclosures: gates, fences, windows, closed stores. A view of the world behind barriers.” The music both embodies and serves as counterpoint to these images of confinement, expanding space and, in its notation, reconfiguring the visual correspondences between image and sound.
Collecting twenty of Marclay’s photographs with twenty of Beresford’s scores, Call and Response reproduces the pairs of images and scores chronologically in an elegant, pared-down, and tactile volume reminiscent of a music notation book. Particularly for those who cannot read music, they are magical pairings in which the imagination fills the quiet and the eye conducts the music. For those who can hear Beresford’s scores, they reveal the possibilties of the musical imagination translating the visual world into the aural. In both cases, Call and Response is one answer to the question of how to connect in a world of dislocation and isolation.