Cally Spooner

DEAD TIME (Melody's Warm Up), 2022

Two-channel sound installation
Cello toning: Melody Giron
Score: Cally Spooner
Recording: Jesse Lewis
Mixing: Tom Sedgwick and Cally Spooner at ZERO... Milano
Mastering: Stephan Mathieu
Running time: 43 minutes, 59 seconds

DEAD TIME (Melody's Warm-Up) is a two-channel sound work, written for cello, building and everything in between. An unedited recording by professional cellist Melody Giron is broadcast from a single loudspeaker. Melody keys Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, an overused and complex solo, but she remains in the Prelude, searching for her timbre. The strata of performance (or industry) - the ones we cover ourselves with over the years or decades - could be peeled away by what doesn't really know how to start, but likes to try, and while the cello's tonalization repeats (the same, each time different), a digital clock beeps every 42 seconds from the second loudspeaker: an aggressive, hyper-synchronized counterpoint in a composition about post-industrial time and possible modes of withdrawal.

DEAD TIME (Melody's Warm-Up) was originally commissioned for the industrial concrete ramp leading to the car test track on the roof of the former FIAT factory in Turin, produced by the Pinacoteca Agnelli Foundation and mixed on site by Federico Chiari.

At La Centrale, the piece is broadcast throughout the power plant.

‍

This project is supported by the Italian Council 2025, DGCC, Ministero della cultura

Cally Spooner

Born in 1983
Based in Turin

Cally Spooner is a British-Italian artist and writer whose choreographies unfold in a variety of media - sound, film, text, objects and drawings - and are rooted in her training in philosophy, critical theory and dance.

His series of five essays on "performance", A Hypothesis of Resistance, was published as a monograph by Mousse, Milan, in 2024. In each essay, Spooner explores and examines temporalities that challenge and eclipse the standards that drive individuals and societies to perform towards an entirely metric future.

Beginning with Asynchronicity, then extending to Rehearsal, The Present Tense, Undetectability and Duration, A Hypothesis of Resistance was edited in collaboration with Will Holder.