‘Alla Turca’ (2012)

FILM CREDITS
Matthew Hawkins: rushes / live images
Tom Hopkins: stereo remix / audio mastering
Anders Rindom: script / project management
Installation still images and all colour
Photographs from Turkey
Jaroslav Moravec: film editing

To see film in HD please use the following link:
https://vimeo.com/111435164

Playing time: 19.20 min.

An installation by Anders Rindom and Tom Hopkins

Wednesday 27th of June to Sunday 1st July 2012

Opening hours: 12.00 to 19.00 except Sunday: 12.00 to 17.00

Union Works (upper floor), 60 Park Street, London SE 1

Long before this installation closed in July 2012, preparations were in full swing for a film that would document it. Live and still images were captured, but it took another two years, full of endless delays before the sound had been remixed, all the pictures had been sequenced and the editing were in place. The result turned out to be a film of modest length with an emphasis on details best suited to be viewed in HD. After considering the various options for publishing it, we eventually chose to upload the result to Vimeo, where it now is available to view for free.

A brief introduction to a film, documenting ‘Alla Turca’ (November 2014)

The film you will find, if you click on the link to the left documents an installation that took place in a derelict warehouse, not far from the river Thames in London. It is a sprawling work, that in the short spell it lasted attempted to evoke a piece of Turkey: the built-up shores of the Bosporus in a very different place, more familiar but just as densely populated and also set on banks of tide swept waters.

The work dares to create the sense of location with very sparse means, only to question the worth of this reconstruction as soon as the work is done. It addresses what it is like to be at one location, but to long for somewhere else at the same time. It acknowledges that many of us measure our close surroundings in minute details, hoping we may work out how to improve the settings.

You could say that the piece is about the urges that can drive emigration. But it would be just as fair to say that it is about what generates tourism. Each impulse has its own set of circumstances, both spurred on by a notion of desire- that something in life is missing.

What for one can be economic necessity, a hope for better prospects somewhere else can for someone else be a nagging sense of unease: a feeling of being restricted, even deprived of a richer, sensory simulation: not having the opportunity to be soaked in narratives, so complex that they can challenge the simple ones you create for yourself.

We all appear to long for what we do not have, but also for a chance to include those missing pieces into the world we occupy, to merge them with all the things we know so well but may hesitate to treasure.

‘In a Turkish manner’, the title given to our piece long before any actual work had even started, is an image made from sounds and objects. It is a story that both dominates yet integrates an interior already full of stories. It strikes up a conversation and asks the viewer to join in, move around and seek out the objects, scattered around the room and to listen out for the elusive sounds, emitted from the speakers.

This is a piece that asks you to make connections, between what is heard and seen, and what is present and absent. It is a work that requires your participation in order to come alive and to speak. Like the location that hosts it and the one it depicts, the work relies on a paradox: that water, even if it is both soft and elusive it may still provide the tough, structural element that helps bring order at such places.

If you listen out you will find that it is indeed the sound of water that pours from the speakers: running and rolling, blending with the sounds of chimes from mosques and hums from old computers. But it is also what you will see: fresh water held in UNICEF approved containers helping to keep sheets of plywood upright and supported; and it is waste water pipes, pugged in with connectors and rubber sealers that you see attached to the many objects and hinting at possibilities for shifting it away again, dirty and unwanted.

We are at a cross road, quite literally between what we want and what we no longer need, suspended for the brief moments the experience of the installation lasts.

The film ends with a series of still images, picked from a larger collection gathered on two trips to Turkey. These pictures formed the seed to the installation. If you pay close attention, you will find that not only did those trips set thoughts in motion: they also provided some of the material that, with a few adjustments in scale or materials could enter the installation as they were found. We hope you enjoy the experience.

‘Alla Turca’ was produced with the support of Illuminate Productions, a not-for-profit arts organization based in London. For further information regarding this enterprise please go to: www.illuminateproductions.co.uk.