Influences: SUSAN HILLER

Christiana and I, went to see the Susan Hiller exhibition to look for inspiration (as suggested to us in the last tutorial).

The whole exhibition was fantastic and extremely interesting but what is important for our project is that we found two artworks that could inspire us to improve our project.

The two works were:

Monument

Monument 1980–1 marks a continuation of Hiller’s interest in lost or forgotten identities. The work was prompted by her discovery of a neglected Victorian monument to civilian heroes in a little-known park in the City of London. The artist photographed and enlarged the park’s memorial plaques and arranged a selection corresponding to each year of her own life. She situated a park bench in front of the photographs, inviting viewers to become an element in the work while listening to its soundtrack.

The use of sound in the work was an innovative development at the time. On the soundtrack the artist suggests there is an unacknowledged uncanny aspect to sound recording, which allows the dead to speak to us.

Monument 1980–1
41 photographs, park bench with audio component

Witness

Each speaker in the installation Witness 2000 transmits a voice telling a story. A wide variety of languages represent testimonies from all over the world. The witnesses describe the experience of an encounter with UFOs or creatures from other spheres. A range of similarities emerges in the descriptions and in the type of language used to describe the experience. An inexplicable vision that might in previous centuries have been described as a religious experience is articulated here in the language of science fiction. Whether imagined, real or hallucinatory, the testimonies demonstrate an essential need for belief in the possibility of a further dimension, in something beyond the rational.

Witness 2000
Approximately 400 speakers, 10 audio tracks, each with multiple recordings; wires, lights

Courtesy the artist
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I find that Monument shares our will of allowing the audience to know someone's identity, where Susan Hiller has decided to focus on long-forgotten Victorian everyday heroes we have decided to use absolutely normal people that are still alive but would inevitably be forgotten in time. As in Monument, our audience will be invited to share a very intimate moment with our characters but instead of being guided through the experience by the artist, they will be left free to make what they want out of the piece.

Observing this artwork has helped us to be braver and to accept the consequences of using real people and realistic thoughts, and to realize that if the audience finds listening to our "sample people" boring that will not be considered as a failure because what is relevant is that they have still taken their time to get involved with our silouhettes, we are not trying to entertain people but to make them reflect about a seemingly insignificant everyday reality which affects us more than we realize.

Witness has had an impact on the way we have decided to present our piece: the beauty of Hiller's artwork is its simplicity and linearity and personally I found it very elegant, this has made me wonder wether we should achieve a simpler and/or more elegant look for our silouhettes, however we haven't had any ideas on how to improve them so far.