Cally Spooner

Cally Spooner presents two works from her sound and choreographic corpus, Deadtime (2018 - 2024).

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.

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-active because it leaks, 2022

Windows open
Continuous

-active because it leaks (2022) is a sound work that functions when the windows of a space remain constantly open, allowing sound to infiltrate as an environmental circumstance for the creation of the work.
-active because it leaks takes its title from Anne Carson's reading of the cinematic method of dead time. Apparently a documentary technique, but contained within a fictional framework, dead time unfolds when a camera continues to film a scene long after the actors have finished their performance, allowing anything unexpected, erratic or erroneous to enter the frame. Actors burst out laughing, step out of character; something rustles in an empty doorway. Capturing everyday, banal activity, bringing to the fore what is usually edited, the cinematic performance cracks. Snippets of telephone conversation, the beep of a pickup, the cry of a baby, and the road outside become sound visits that spill into the power station, via -active because it leaks.

In Chandoline, -active because it leaks intertwines with DEAD TIME (Melody's Warm Up), establishing a threshold between inside and outside that merges into a continuous encounter of incidental listening.

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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.