History of the Present is an experimental feminist opera-film about class and conflict, which first premiered in Belfast on 19th April 2023, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement and is now touring nationally and internationally. It was made collaboratively by Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon, featuring new compositions by Annea Lockwood, libretto by Maria Fusco and improvisational vocal work by Héloïse Werner.
Clare Archibald interviewed Maria, Margaret and Annea over email about the aims and process of making the piece.
Clare Archibald: The four of you have much in common in terms of the interdisciplinary, collaborative and iterative nature of your individually deep practices, was this at the forefront in putting the History of the Present team together or was the involvement of the others something that evolved more organically?
Maria Fusco: This is an entirely collaborative work between myself and Margaret: I don’t think I could have made it with anyone else. I guess a key part of interdisciplinary collaboration is firstly locating a shared sensibility (perhaps this comes with having experienced the other’s work) and then devising a way to effectively communicate, without reduction – allowing oneself to be the amateur and the professional at the same time. I am literally just so happy that we built this intergenerational, intersectional feminist environment to make this project: it was so complex. And laughter, there was a lot of laughter.
CA: History of the Present starts with sound in darkness and I think is hugely successful in the sonic structure of trauma, constraints, the everyday and how we perceive the tenses of our history on both a personal and public level. The archive sound with your mum (and a young you?) brings an entirely different dimension in terms of both tone and time in addition to Annea’s composition and Héloïses’s vocalisations. We spoke previously about me abandoning an attempt to record my dad talking about his summers as a boy working a Warrenpoint outboard ferry because he kept adopting a formal tone – how did you come to have the archive recordings and how do you feel about recording as a way to preserve accuracy of tone, capture the vernacular?
MF: The work yes, begins with an overture of one of Annea’s phrases that she evolved from field recordings of the peace line I grew up beside in a working-class area of Belfast. There is a preparation of sorts in that, an establishment of tone and attention, maybe a tuning fork. Margaret and I decided early on not to use visual archival material and instead to focus on sonic archival material. As you can imagine, this was for a number of reasons, but maybe the key one here is that, from my own lived experience, when you are in a house and there is a riot on, you are not usually standing at the front window looking out, you are hiding in case something which could hurt you (like a rubber bullet, like a petrol bomb) might come in through the window, so the memory of such conflict is largely sonic: this feels authentic and also new. Margaret’s cinematography is subtle and considered. After the first screening in Belfast, a documentary film-maker who lives there told me that he’d never seen Belfast like that before, that it offered a totally different, original view. Now obviously that’s due to Margaret’s talented eye and it is also due to the refusal to rely on visual archival stuff to shortcut historical context.
The inclusion of personal archival material had been there right from the start for me. It is lucky and perhaps very unusual for people of my class, and age to have a smattering of such domestic recordings – not many of them but enough, I think, to constitute an act of oral history – of women’s voices inside a small, thinly-made house. It was not entirely pleasant to have to listen to my mother’s voice repeatedly in making this work (she died in the middle of it) just as would be expected, but it was necessary in order to describe how a child (me) learns accent, learns voice, learns context.
CA: It felt to me that the film in addition to being one of the personal, place and the political it’s also about how art is made, with aspects of that specifically referenced in relation to perception and perhaps more allusively in reference to your own personal art history perhaps. So when we see the sculpture of F.E. McWilliams Woman in a Bomb Blast being cleaned, could it be read as your own study of sculpture and how the forms and buildings around you were both constraint and escape (I remember you saying you went to art school because you used to pass it and the door was open and you thought that’s a place I can go in)? You have said that this is your most intimate work to date.
MF: F.E. McWilliam’s sculpture Woman in a Bomb Blast is part of the Ulster Museum’s collection. The museum was a free, relatively neutral politically speaking, place in Belfast that I used to visit regularly as a child. It was also warm, as were libraries: these circumstantial things are not incidental to a working-class experience of culture, in my opinion and experience. The sculpture was the first time I had seen a representation of the sort of violence I was seeing in reality, which is of itself performative. The work we have made is a not a documentary, Margaret and I take a structuralist approach, I think, in this work, to showing how we, as women, work together, that is why we have included background images and sounds, such as the museum conservator caring for the sculpture as it is brought out of the store. Margaret’s camera follows each tiny action: every action counts.
CA: What do you see as the physical future of Belfast, do you think that aspects of the defensive architecture should remain as living documents of the past? Do you see your film as a bridge to something else in a changing city?
MF: One of my favourite lines in the libretto is ‘our futures are a matter of seconds’. Whilst this was true in a real and life-threatening way when I was growing up, it continues to remain to be true in terms of how personal and collective trauma sutures time. The defensive architecture in Belfast – the peace lines which, according to wording in The Good Friday Agreement should have all been demolished by now- still remain, the vast majority of them anyway. People in Belfast are always very close the/ their futures.
CA: What was your thinking around the vocalisations from Héloïse? In my own work I have previously used instruments of breath such as the harmonica, harmonium and contact mic recordings of my heartbeat etc. to convey bodily experiences of birthing trauma/conflict, so it was especially interesting for me to see this expression. How did she prepare? Her face works as a map almost, a choreography of sound and adds an extra layer to the film, did you anticipate that she would visually appear or did that evolve?
MF: Adrienne Rich wrote “The unconscious wants truth, as the body does.” I had invited Héloïse to work with me in an opera-share event at the Royal Opera House in the early stages of the project and was so impressed by her sensitivity and obvious vocal abilities. Margaret and I wanted to capture the jeopardy of live improvisation, the effort that is required and the attention needed. In the film, Héloïses’s face shows this very clearly, she is performing and not performing at the same time, which ‘casts’ the audience in an interesting and, I think, very active way: they have to ask themselves what they are actually watching. This is analogous to historization, I think. We were careful not to overprepare her improvisations, fearing this would impede the freshness of the improvisation, so we discussed the sort of sounds Héloïse would be working with (emblematic sounds from The Troubles, such as a low-flying helicopter, a Saracen which is an army armoured vehicle) and then they played ‘fresh’ through the earpiece that is visible in the film, what the audience is invited to do is to watch closely, to see Héloïse attempting to embody what she is experiencing through voice.
CA: You say in the press release that you want to take working class women’s voices into places like the Royal Opera House, and you have obviously achieved this both in terms of the work itself and with the planned screening performances at Art Night Dundee, the Royal Opera House, Edinburgh Arts Festival etc but how do you feel about how accessible, financially and in terms of cultural confidence perhaps, the work is to working class women/people in its medium/form and places of performance/screening? How do you navigate the potentially alienating obstacles of language such as libretto and place of performance for people, particularly when the work is about people being architecturally designed out of places? Do you have plans to screen in different community contexts?
MF: Part of our thinking around having this work as an opera-film, rather than just perhaps a straightforward opera, was obviously creative in terms of being able to include a range of different types of filmed material and places in an unmediated way. Another, crucial, factor was the accessibility of screening, where it can travel to, how much it costs to watch it (free in many cases) the sorts of venues it can be seen in, at home, in a community centre etc. so this is really important to us. Whilst the work starts from one particular location (Ardoyne, North Belfast) and with one person (me, the writer and me the body in historical space) our hope is that it resonates globally with others who have experienced and continue to experience what it is like to survive in a conflict / post-conflict zones.
Some of the work’s partners reflect this ambition, like Glasgow Women’s Library and the Global Women’s Narrative Project, who collect testimony from women in war zones.
CA: The film has a fair amount of individuals and organisations such as Glasgow Women’s Library, the Abbey Theatre Dublin that you worked in partnership with, was this a complex configuration to establish and process to manage? Do you see the process of how such things come to be made as a barrier to greater inclusion/diversity within the arts or a source of added meaning/richness?
MF: Put simply, work of this scale and ambition could not happen without involving many different institutions, funders etc., this is a laboursome reality. One that we do not necessarily get paid for. I also have a full-time job, which I take seriously and work hard at. It’s also important to remember that a large portion of this activity took place during Covid, elongating the process and ability to travel to Belfast. I had to be extremely persistent, in the adversity of such barriers, my mother’s death, the restrictions that my working-class background have afforded me and of course the necessity to step back, to invite other people in, to remember and to keep remembering this. I am the youngest of four children, my siblings are much older than I am, I think this made me good at listening.
CA: Your words are so powerful and perfectly balanced within the whole (I won’t quote them as better to hear from you) How was it to see your film and hear your words about your experience of a place spoken in public for the first time in that very place as part of the Belfast International Festival? Were you nervous about how it would be received?
MF: It felt essential to launch the work in Belfast, as part of the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of The Good Friday Agreement. We are all looking to the future.
CA: I love that we see you at the peace line for the first time feeling the patina of the peeling paint, it really brings together the layers of looking, listening and time. Your work has always had a visual element both in its performance in the moment and it’s documentation, and the images related to your Piano Series – Piano Burning in particular, and the Glass Concert are iconic as are other innovations like your graphic score for Pauline Oliveros – how would you quantify the value of looking and feeling in a tactile sense as a precursor to listening for you?
Annea Lockwood: Yes, visual traces do come into my work quite often, ranging from the explicitly visual, surreal image of a piano smothered in plants, to the sonic unwinding of the bayou map in bayou-borne, for Pauline, but there is no quantifying this. Sometimes image and sound come to me together, as with the Lascaux cave paintings projected in Thousand Year Dreaming, sometimes the image generates the idea for the sound piece, as with ‘bayou-borne…; where I saw a map of the bayous flowing through Houston and immediately thought of Pauline-improvisation-resonance. With the sound recordings of the peace lines, tactile feeling – their surfaces, immense height and weight, the way they seem to absorb sound – led me into their sounds. Even before I came to Belfast, Pedro Rebelo, the director of S.A.R.C. at Queens University, and Georgios Varoutsos started recording at the walls for me, then last October I was able to come to Belfast, and we worked together making the recordings I used in the composition, which was a great experience.
CA: You told me that you welcomed the opportunity to really delve into Belfast’s history – what new knowledge were you most surprised/shocked by or interested in? Did Belfast’s history make you consider dusk differently?
AL: I had known in a very general way about the Troubles, partly because I was in London when Bernadette Devlin was elected to the House of Commons in 1969 and was moved by her passionate, brilliant activism. But I had not really grasped just how deep the intimate violence ran until I first read Maria’s libretto, then began searching for everything I could read, from Anna Burns’ novel, Milkman, (2018) to Patrick Radden Keefe’s detailed, reflective history, Say Nothing, a true story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland, (2020).
This so-recent history has not affected how I respond to dusk, (which is an intriguing question), but it has affected how I am looking at the struggles, divisions and violence among communities here in the US at present, with apprehension and sadness.
CA: You are known for the time and care with which you develop co-existent listening relationships – how did it feel to spend time with the peace lines that hold so much trauma and divide and all that brings with it? I know from spending time with you at the Camp residency in France that you have a playful approach, how did you reconcile this both in approach and in the composition itself?
AL: While we were recording the walls I was entirely focused in the moment and, together with Pedro and Georgios, on searching out every possible way of sounding the walls beyond simply striking them. We were all learning to play the walls as a huge instrument – stroking them with leaves, stones, hands, moving the locks on huge gates used for blocking off streets, recording to seven tracks with three different types of microphones simultaneously, which gave me so much variation to work with since each microphone ‘modulated’ a sound differently, according to its design. We had just two days to work and I wanted to generate a lot of material to take back to my studio in New York.
When I started composing I trusted that the reading I was doing and my responses to it would affect my composing without my attempting conscious expression, so I was focused on flow, structure, balance, variety, how these sounds would move through space and relate to one another. Maria and Margaret had given me complete freedom to compose as I was drawn to, something I very much appreciated, so I could explore these sounds fully. With the film in mind, I tried to avoid overt drama or any hint of narrative, and instead create a form of soundscape which brought out the physical sense of the peace lines but could recede into the background when necessary.
CA: I was really struck by the synchronicities of practice between the team – for example, both you and Héloïse, for example, have made work that explores both the surface and underneath the water and all of you have an approach driven by experimenting freely. You are in your eighties now; did you expect to still be finding sounds and situations that excite you? (I feel I know the answer to this already). How do you feel about the recent increased interest in your work, if indeed you think there has been one – you have always been very productive and highly regarded but do you think of ideas of legacy and choose work such as History of the Present accordingly?
AL: This project excited me very much precisely because it was experimental, and different from anything I have done before in terms of medium and approach. But also, because when Maria and Margaret approached me, they mentioned particularly the way my sound brings out a sense of the materiality of the source, its nature, which is so important to me. And I hope such really fresh encounters with ‘sounds and situations’ and also with other sound makers will continue, so I choose the invitations and projects I take on with this in front of mind, rather than ‘legacy.’ Legacy is something I think about in terms of Ruth Anderson’s beautiful body of work now that she is gone, rather than my own.
CA: Do you think that the situation and recognition for women working in sound has improved?
AL: Oh yes, and your own work and life reflect this too, Clare. There are so many women, of all ages, working in all genres and capacities being recognized now, it is thrilling – room to stretch, and much more practical and critical support. But still History of the Present stands out to me as a special project created by an entirely female team extending beyond the four of us to include Bobbi Cameron, producer, Chu-Li Shewring, sound design consultant, and Betty Brunfaut and Bakthtawer Haider at Plan B Creative Studio. The work was supported by the Royal Opera House’s Engender scheme of which Maria was a Fellow, a ground-changing “initiative to change gender imbalance in opera and music theatre and drive towards gender equity in all areas of the opera” (www.roh.org.uk)
CA: You’ve recently released a record Tête-à-Tête featuring Resolutions and Conversations by Ruth Anderson and For Ruth by Annea Lockwood, Ergot Records both released after her death following many decades of what you’ve referred to as a lucky life together – do you think of yourself in constant dialogue with Ruth still via your ongoing work as well as the sounds and places you have shared? In some ways the emotional mapping and now shared private conversation archive in Tête-à-Tête parallel Maria’s in terms of Belfast, her family recordings and her own bereavement, you’ve spoken to me before of suddenly feeling the connections and awareness of our own being via place did you learn something new about yourself/the way you work from being part of History of the Present?
AL: I am hoping that dialogue with Ruth will never end. The parallel you touch on with Maria’s own sharing of private archival material and bereavement is an interesting one which had not occurred to me, a shared openness. In terms of Belfast, working on structures which are such a direct, material reflection of community trauma was a deeply resonant experience; I expect its influence will show up in my work and I will suddenly recognise it. Everything eventually flows into the ‘soil’ of ongoing work. Engagement with the making of this powerful film was a precious opportunity for which I am profoundly grateful.
CA: I especially love the trail of visual clues throughout as to what we are experiencing, the graffiti murals that tell us where we are and centre ideas of community, the birds leading into helicopters from Héloïse. What came first, the sounds or the images? The credits also feel fully important, as reward perhaps for entering the experimental space and as invitation to rewatch and listen with additional confirmed clues, of the noises being voiced for example.
MS: When Maria and I first began collaborating we spoke about our approach to sound and the legacy of particular sounds within post conflict communities and bodies. We also spoke about the history of, and well-established approach to, visual representations of Belfast and the Troubles. We agreed that the visual archive would be absent from the work, replaced by an intuitive, enquiring looking, and that sound could engage with multiple temporalities through the operatic form.
We collected various elements in stages – Annea’s recordings and score, Maria’s performed Libretto and historical family recordings, Héloïses’s improvisations as well as a range of production-based field recordings – and through this process of research and material enquiry we gathered a good deal of content, which we then shaped as we edited together, with only a loose sense of how it should be. The space of experimental editing is essential to this kind of work – the synthesis of materials and content through seeing and hearing them placed together in linear form – and there was a real sense of discovery when Maria and I were editing after months of gleaning and exploring and making.
CA: Blurred images are always my favourite and you have so many beautiful ones juxtaposed with the geometric, with glass doors, windows and steam especially conjuring ideas of inside and out, escape, constraints but also a domestic kind of sensuousness that both underlines and takes the sharper edges off the reality being conveyed. The press release explains that Vaseline was smeared on the lens at times – I wondered why this detail was included, was it to demystify the experimental process or to make it clear what to expect or another reason?
MS: Abstraction and optical experimentation are visual strategies we employed within this work and as the cinematographer I played with a range of methods and equipment to engage with the material of film itself whilst also interrogating modes of representation. Blurring through focus as well as Vaseline, split screen, double exposure; these were analogue techniques that informed our visual process and functioned as an expansion as well as a critic of perception, subjectivity, the documentary and reality. The press release is constructed for journalists to expand upon the filmmaking process for review and background – it’s interesting and fun to talk about technique but it’s not essential for an audience to know what was done or how or to demystify the process as an act of translation. I’m always happy to talk about experimental techniques as they have conceptual and theoretical relationships to the work but… hopefully all audiences can feel and experience this without my explanation. I think audiences have a great capacity to engage with and understand less mainstream content – and there’s a brilliant history of this in Britain – through the early commissions and broadcasts of Channel 4, and British Film Institute and support for films like Riddles of the Sphinx etc.
CA: The Ardoyne community is thanked in the credits and there are a couple of frames where people in the street appear to have some consciousness of being filmed – how do you manage location shoots and what was the general response to you and the filming within the community?
MS: We worked across Belfast and were received warmly in all locations. Whenever we worked on the street or in a community or private space we used respectful means to seek permission and to indicate that filming is in progress. With the 35mm film camera it’s a highly visible process – and in fact we (the camera crew, in this case mostly women) often become the focus of public attention (a role reversal!). Overall, I felt warmly welcomed in Belfast and had a strong sense that people were aware of filmmaking and photography as a craft, as many communities are, these days.
CA: I was interested to hear you talk about how the photojournalism of the war in Vietnam, of which your dad was a veteran, led you to photography and filming, do you think your approach to conflict and how it is expressed has changed in relation to this work?
MS: War photography, especially the films and photographs which came out of the US Vietnam War when I was a young child, certainly informed my early start in photography; when I learned about photo-journalists covering the conflict and saw how the images they made shifted and changed US public consciousness about the war, I became drawn to the medium. At the time I longed to understand why my father behaved the way he did, and I thought, as a young adult, that if I understood war I might understand him better. He was an alcoholic, often abusive and clearly suffered from undiagnosed PTSD; and I loved him dearly. I see photography and film as a learning, researching, medium – one can observe, witness and learn, through spending time someplace, with someone or something. Working in artists film allows additional creative space to unpack my desire to understand or to witness and observe, but also to explore what that means within a complex network of identity, representation, politics and culture. My camerawork with Maria on History of the Present was responsive to the complexities of Northern Irish history, and mainstream representations of the city and the peace lines, but it also was deeply subjective – in that it is not a general documentary or a news story. In finding a visual language for the work, we were thinking about the embodied histories of the voice in/of the film, the role of politics in that and about defining structures within filmmaking, opera, sonic memory and defensive architecture.
History of the Present will be performed at Art Night Dundee on June 24th, The Royal Opera House on July 2nd, and the Edinburgh Art Festival on August 11th.
Maria Fusco (b.1972) is an award-winning working-class writer, born and brought up in Ardoyne, North Belfast, now living in Scotland. Her interdisciplinary work spans the registers of critical, fiction and performance writing; she has authored six books, and written and directed four major performance works. Twitter: @fuscowriting
Annea Lockwood (b.1939) is an acclaimed New Zealand-born American composer based in upstate New York. Her lifelong fascination with the visceral effects of sound in our environments and through our bodies serves as the focal point for works ranging from concert music to performance art to multimedia installations.
Margaret Salmon (b.1975) is a New York-born artist filmmaker based in Glasgow. Winner of the inaugural Max Mara Prize for Women in association with The Whitechapel, recent exhibitions include Monument at Secession, Vienna and the British Art Show 9. Salmon lectures in Fine Art Critical Studies and Photography at The Glasgow School of Art. Twitter: @margaretOsalmon
Héloïse Werner (b.1991) is a French-born and London-based soprano and composer who was awarded the Michael Cuddigan Trust award 2018 and Linda Hirst Contemporary Vocal Prize 2017. From the 2023/24 season she joins London’s Wigmore Hall as an Associate Artist, holding the position for five seasons. As a composer she has written for a range of orchestras and musicians in the UK, France and internationally. Twitter: @Heloise_Werner
Clare Archibald (b.1969) is a Scottish writer from Lanarkshire now living in coastal Fife. She uses words, sounds, images, and materials to explore articulation, time, place, movement and the between spaces of the real and imagined, and the private and the public. Twitter: @archieislander
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