Dust

Dust

Stereo sound work with single screen video, 8 mins, 2006 (remixed 2023).

In the partly sung, partly spoken female monologue (spoken by Paula Berry, with music by Paul Rooney, Oliver Jackson and Greg Arrowsmith) a fictional hotel room attendant  describes a song (the Brecht-Weill song Pirate Jenny, which is about a hotel ‘maid’ who looks out of her hotel window and imagines a ship that appears in the harbour, a ship that has come to avenge her suffering). The maid’s description of her song is, in turn, imaginatively expanded to incorporate various historical moments involving ships that do not berth and remain offshore, including the Norwegian container ship Tampa, which, when carrying Afghan refugees in 2001, was not allowed to land on Australian territory and was condemned to wait offshore for days in the glare of the world’s media. A single unedited video shot of the view walking the deck of a freighter accompanies the sound. A landmass can just be discerned at the rear of the ship, as distant and hazy as the stories and experiences of the refugees that we can only vainly attempt to imagine. Originally commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella as part of the Single Shot project at Tate Britain.

The work is released on the album Surface Industries II by Paul Rooney on Owd Scrat Records.

Steven Bode (Film and Video Umbrella website). April 2021 article about the work.

Samantha Culp (South China Morning Post). 7/8/2007 review of the work.

Paul O’Kane (A-N magazine). Jan. 2007 review of the work.

Tate Britain project page. 2006.