The Orange House, 2019
The Orange House
Visual: Edited clips featuring flowing water, recorded in Cordoba, Spain.
Audio: The artists' voice
Video: 2:18 (minutes)
2019
The Orange House explores the power of the female voice through the act of storytelling, and the instinctual and biological connection, all beings have, to water.
According to the Social Psychologist, Julia Chaitin, who focuses her research on psychosocial impacts:
“Stories, narratives, and storytelling are central aspects of all cultures. They play key roles both in the escalation and potentially the de-escalation of intergroup conflicts.”
The Orange Building explores this history of storytelling while incorporating the female voice as a way of empowering and calling attention to the voices of women, throughout history, who have been ignored and lack representation within history books. Men have always taken the lead role of this fundamental form of communication, where some even claim women's stories as their own. This video serves as a reminder of this sociopolitical injustice experienced by the female sex. It calls for all voices to be heard with the same respect.
Throughout the video, the visual aspect focuses on water. Water connects everything on the earth. All creatures need water to survive. It’s this connection between all things that can be compared to and associated with the cultural act of storytelling and the exchange of narratives. While the water embodies the act of storytelling it also tells it’s own story of the times when people had close, spiritual relationships with nature and the earth. Where people would experiment with herbal medicines and the holistic approach to life.
At the beginning and end of The Orange Building the video flashes. At first, a scene of fish, swimming in a pond, blinks in and out of darkeness. While the ending flashes quickly between a collection of videos that are shown throughout the piece, representing the deep and complex histories of storytelling. It observes that many stories are being told simultaneously, at all times. Each scene in the video tells its own story, sometimes overlapping with one another. The introduction to the female voice starts with the word “everything” being repeated, initially slowly as though it is forbidden to speak. Further in the video, the storytelling voice competes with the sounds of a storm, perhaps as a reminder that stories can also be lies or myths used to manipulate and challenge, and belittle the other.