YIAYIA'S SONG
video and sound installation in collaboration with artist Kate Murphy
Group Exhibition
Curated by Bec Dean, at Carriageworks, Sydney.
"Kate Murphy and I were discussing possibilites of collaborating on an installation project. I told her about an old tape I found at my parent's home, which was about to be thrown out. We discovered that my mother was recording audio on our 1976 family pilgramage to my father's village. It turned out that my grandmother in Greece 'secretly' borrowed the tape recorder and recorded a mournful song about losing children to migration. The Greek word 'Xenitiá' means 'foreign lands', and 'Yiayia' means grandmother. She knew the tape would come back to Australia, and we may never see her again. She was right. Instantly, Kate new the project had to be based on that.
From there, we interviewed my family members about their experience with migration, but at the end of each interview we presented the song to them.. prior to that they had no knowledge the recording existed. The emotions that surfaced were powerful and visible, captured on video. The installation ran on two phases:
1) snippets of the interviews. Viewers were free to wander to each screen to hear dialogue, while an ambient version of the track playing throughout the space.
2) footage of people listening to the song in its entirety, in it's raw form. The intention was to hear the voice reverberating through the eerie spaces of Carriageworks"
Basil Hogios
Curated by Bec Dean, at Carriageworks, Sydney.
"Kate Murphy and I were discussing possibilites of collaborating on an installation project. I told her about an old tape I found at my parent's home, which was about to be thrown out. We discovered that my mother was recording audio on our 1976 family pilgramage to my father's village. It turned out that my grandmother in Greece 'secretly' borrowed the tape recorder and recorded a mournful song about losing children to migration. The Greek word 'Xenitiá' means 'foreign lands', and 'Yiayia' means grandmother. She knew the tape would come back to Australia, and we may never see her again. She was right. Instantly, Kate new the project had to be based on that.
From there, we interviewed my family members about their experience with migration, but at the end of each interview we presented the song to them.. prior to that they had no knowledge the recording existed. The emotions that surfaced were powerful and visible, captured on video. The installation ran on two phases:
1) snippets of the interviews. Viewers were free to wander to each screen to hear dialogue, while an ambient version of the track playing throughout the space.
2) footage of people listening to the song in its entirety, in it's raw form. The intention was to hear the voice reverberating through the eerie spaces of Carriageworks"
Basil Hogios
