The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Close Encounters of the Edinburgh Kind
Music from movie soundtracks film on the soul of New Orleans
HIGH up in the former Observatory buildings on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, in the imposing City Dome that once held a substantial telescope for the use of the city’s amateur star gazers, the sound of alien music is ringing out.
Or at least, alien for those who recognise the base chords in Cauleen Smith’s 2014 work H-E-L-L-O as those of the extraterrestrial visitors in Steven Spielberg’s epic sci-fi film
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Already emotive, those chords take on new significance in this evocative work from the American artist, here with her first solo showing in Scotland, a piece filmed in New Orleans some nine years after the devastation and loss of life and home of Hurricane Katrina (2005).
“Smith has taken those five notes from that iconic score and reinterpreted them,” says guest curator at Collective, Emmie McCluskey.
Filmed in places of historic importance for the communities that live and lived there – whether that is Congo Square where enslaved Africans would meet and make music on their ‘free’ Sundays or St
Augustine Parish Church, the first Catholic church to be founded by free people of colour in the 19th century – the music is played by some of that city’s musicians on instruments ranging from the wrap-around sousaphone to the cello and the cumbersome contra bassoon, an instrument whose lowest notes are in the lowest ranges of human hearing.
In a city synonymous with music, with marching bands and mardi gras and jazz, and with a long African American culture, Smith’s work uses music to denote the grief of loss and the hope for the future post-Katrina. “There is also a sense of unity, this is [the musician’s] testament to their city,” says McCluskey.
McCluskey points out that in Close Encounters, humans spend a lot of time overcomplicating the issue of what the aliens are trying to say – usually involving wildly elaborate mathematical calculations – when all they’re really trying to say is Hello. “When you hear it in the film, in the Dome, it’s a very full-bodied experience. These huge instruments, you can walk whilst playing them, you can imagine the amount of breath and energy that takes.”
Born in 1967 in California, Smith, who currently holds positions at Vermont College of Fine Art and the California Institute of Art, studied at San Francisco State University (Creative Arts, BA) and the University of California, Los Angeles, Film, Theatre and Television School before realising that her experimental work sat more comfortably in the realm of contemporary art.
“Her work is about black people and their lives,” says McCluskey. “Smith’s work, with its emphasis on the possibilities of the imagination, touches on Afro-futurism allied with a sense of history, leaning towards optimism and kindness and ideas of radical giving and community, such as in imagining and seeking out communities that have found a way to function successfully, explored in her 2018 film, Soujourner.
“Her influences come from those who’ve looked to space as a way of imagining different realities for a world that may be not working for that community.”
McCluskey first encountered Smith’s work some years ago, programming it as part of Lux Scotland at Glagow’s Tramway in
discussion with Ima-Abasi Okon and Kimberley O’Neill. “But it operates totally differently in a film festival context, and the three of us at the time were keen on how to install it to best effect, and we thought the Dome was a really interesting building to stage it in. I have to credit Ima and Kim in that! We were in awe of Cauleen’s practice.”
McCluskey also felt the work would resonate in another way in
Edinburgh. “New Orleans is very different to Edinburgh, but this idea of how Edinburgh functions as a city based around culture, is part of the interest of the work in Edinburgh.
“All these creative industries are based in Edinburgh, and yet there is also displacement of people. There are all these issues around who can be in the city, when, and that’s come in to sharp relief during the pandemic.”
In April this year, a live performance of the film score is in hopeful planning, using musicians from Edinburgh’s community, something which Smith is very keen to explore, McCluskey tells me.
“Smith sees her films as invitations. Her belief in art and culture to be central to everything and her optimism about the essential need for culture is key. Hopefully that is something that people will take away from the work too.”
Cauleen Smith: H-E-L-L-O, Collective Gallery, City Dome, Calton Hill, Edinburgh, 0131 556 1264, www.collective-edinburgh.art Until 1 May, Thurs - Sun, 10am - 4pm