Memento Mori

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Mark Vernon (Scotland)

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The Square, Kilfinane

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8th-9th May & 28th-30th May

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Creators: Mark Vernon (Scotland)

Location: The Square, Kilfinane

Date & Time: 8th-9th May & 28th-30th May

Duration: N/A

A powerful composition that blends 20 years of archive recordings from Kilfinane, fresh field recordings, transferred to tape, cut up, buried in the soil of Kilfinane, with magnets, dug up cleaned and spliced – first performed as a rough-cut at HearSay17 and now released in its final form – “Vernon’s work shows us how memory can degrade, fail, put things in the wrong order, scramble the truth, forget some parts and distort others, and so forth. The intervention of the magnets is particularly poignant, somehow; it’s like some brutal uncaring fact of life, causing eradication of our cherished memories and leaving these strange, unexpected gaps …. this tape exudes life and passion, the voices of the people and their town still shining forth with a resilience that belies all these attempts to efface them. It’s an impressionistic collage, for sure; you can’t make out the detail of a single spoken word; yet the cadences of human speech are ineradicable. I think all of this proves something about the sheer endurance of our shared humanity, which survives in spite of its supposed fragility.” Ed Pinsent Sound Projector