‘History of the Present’

A conference was organised at Queen’s University Belfast last month to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. The speakers included both Bill and Hillary Clinton and several other current and former American, British and Irish leaders. On the flanks of this ticketed, barricaded, high-security fiesta, a range of cultural events foregrounded the faces, voices and impact of community leaders and organisers who have worked towards equality and reconciliation before and after armed conflict officially ceased.

Amanda Dunsmore’s Agreement, a set of Warholian durational video portraits of the original political engineers of the peace agreement, was showing at Ulster University. HIVE, a community choir, performed live, delivering an impishly funny choral rearrangement of the 35-page at Queen’s University’s Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC). Hannah Starkey’s photographic portraits of female activists and organisers are on display at the Ulster Museum, as is the Array Collective’s footage of drag balls and charismatic campaigning. At the Table at the MAC is a table and (lots of) chairs talkie show to discuss ongoing social inequalities in Northern Ireland. And Maria Fusco’s new opera-film, History of the Present, had its premiere at the Queen’s Film Theatre.

Fusco recorded a documentary for Radio 4 in 2018 with Glenn Patterson. She reflected on her early life growing up alongside the ‘peace line’, 34 kilometres of cement and meshed steel, sixty feet high, dividing Catholic and Protestant communities, first erected in 1969 and still gated at 9 p.m. every night. The wall loomed tall at the end of the Fusco family’s back garden in Ardoyne. In the documentary she describes a moment when she had been left outside in her pram and a grenade landed beneath it, throwing it up into the air. The pram’s sturdy casing and excellent suspension, tested on landing, saved her. After making the documentary, Fusco had a lingering sense that there was more in her experiences to plumb. She approached the Royal Opera House. Why an opera? they asked. What had entered the body as sound in the 1970s and 1980s, she replied, must come out now as voice. And why us? Because you’re ‘royal’.

Over a three-year development process, Fusco first cast the soprano Héloïse Werner then brought on board the filmmaker Margaret Salmon and sound artist Annea Lockwood. While Fusco wrote a libretto including archive audio from her childhood and Werner’s improvisations, Salmon shot footage in Fusco’s old neighbourhood, as well as the docklands and central thoroughfares. Working with SARC colleagues, Lockwood recorded sounds from the wall using an omnidirectional geophone. They ran a stone up and down its corrugated grooves, scooped peeling paint from its divots, guided a leaf across its ridges.

The film opens with a shot of Werner, wearing headphones: ‘Can I have it a bit louder, a bit louder, still.’ She’s concentrating on a prompt we cannot hear. ‘AH, AH, AH, AH, AH,’ she begins, releasing pops of air from the back of her throat before she speeds them up, their pitch rising and falling discontinuously. Her head is filmed at mid-range and as she makes these sounds it bobs up and down, following the utterances. Then: ‘Fsssssssssss, fssssssssss,’ she spits, longer sounds, from between teeth and bottom lip. Are these machine sounds? Spraying metal? Chopping air? Is Werner performing the army machine, or the person listening beneath?

The next shot is of a working-class neighbourhood lined with redbrick terraces. Steam rises from vent pipes, sun shines on wet tarmac, fog clears over distant hills. Cut to an image of a family painted on an end-terrace, a peace mural in Ardoyne. Traffic sounds are audible, and restful by comparison with Werner’s voice. Cut again, to a museum interior, quiet, carefully lit. A conservator dusts a model of Frederick Edward McWilliam’s Woman in a Bomb Blast (1974). It’s a bronze female figure thrust backwards, mid-air, arms out and fingers clawing for purchase, the fabric of her dress flung back across her face. The camera creeps across it and from nowhere a whip of sound lashes across, clear but untraceable.

Some of the field recordings used in History of the Present are more personal. One, made by Fusco’s older brother when they were children, captures their mother’s Belfast accent guiding her intonation through a nursery rhyme. In another section, Werner follows the intonation of an interview between Jon Snow and Gerry Adams. To get round the terms of the broadcasting ban imposed in 1988, which usually meant that edited synopses of Republican viewpoints were broadcast rather than individual’s voices, the Channel 4 journalist Mary Holland had asked the actor Stephen Rea to recite the Sinn Féin leader’s words over the muted footage of him speaking (Rea soon became, by both men’s accounts, Adams’ favoured overdubber). In History of the Present, Fusco guides Werner through this subversive episode of mimicry, following the careful rise and fall of the supplanted voice, in a subversive mimicry of her own.

There are a few interludes, between shots of Ardoyne, when Fusco recites her own words in her own voice. One is a remembrance of daily humiliations: a girl’s bra snapped by British soldiers; an older woman jeered by them; petrol bombs; smashed glass; a girl getting her school socks dirty when she leaped to avoid flying bullets, ‘falling to the ground into a ball to keep herself safe’. Fusco’s voice is accompanied by Salmon’s footage of a spotlight being directed around an obscure surface, something like a wiped-down blackboard. Immediately afterwards, Werner appears again: her sound effects give way to dramatic expression, her voice climbs and peaks, the pressure of what we’ve just heard described is punctured, and released.

History of the Present forges connections to a raft of recent literature from the region, and a lineage of experimental films with innovative use of sound from the Berwick Street Film Collective’s Ireland Behind the Wire (1974) to more recent work by artists like Mairead McClean. How to communicate, this film asks, when information has long been skewed, when your mother tongue was replaced by another, and even its cadence was dubbed out?

‘History of the Present’ will be shown at Art Night Dundee on 24 June, at the Royal Opera House in London on 2 July and at the Edinburgh Festival on 11 August.