2”30 extract from video projection (8”00) in multi-media installation I Hate, commissioned by Documenta 12

This extract shows the third section of an eight minute video sequence which forms part of the installation I Hate (2007). The video shows Edward Woodman with speech therapist Judith Langley, as Edward works to master correct pronounciation of certain sounds. Edward lost his ability to speak following a cycling accident in 2000. As they concentrate on minute details of pronounciation, words are broken down into parts and repeated. Using the hands to feel the breath of the plosive ‘h’ sound, word fragments become sonic objects passed back and forth between the two, in a process of constant re-forming and variation. In the mantra of repetition, words, sounds and concepts become dissociated and given meanings unstable.

I Hate was conceived as an acoustic landscape of speech sounds and structures. It focuses on the speech and photographs of Edward Woodman, who was known in London during the ‘80’s and 90’s as a photographer of architecture and art installations. Unable to continue his professional work after his accident, Woodman began to regularly photograph the building site of the Eurostar terminal at Kings Cross, London, from the same set of viewpoints, throughout the seven years of its development. His roughly sellotaped panoramic images record the cityscape in a continual process of destruction, alteration and construction – processes which seem to echo the tiny, continually changing sound-forms heard in the video. In the installation, the panoramas are (re)presented on three flat-screen monitors in an interactive table-top display. Woodman’s hands move across the screens pointing out details and supporting his speech as he struggles to describe the images; his voice can be heard as an immersive sound composition within a curved wall construction nearby. On two LED displays transcriptions of his words run a little too rapidly to follow with ease. At one of the gallery behind a felt-covered acoutic screen, the full 8”00 video sequence is projected.

With: Judith Langley and Edward Woodman
Camera: Imogen Stidworthy
Video and sound editing: Imogen Stidworthy

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