Elisa Ferrari

Please join us for our last program of Edge Effects, which marks the exhibition's final day. Celebratory refreshments will follow.

At this event, exhibiting artist Elisa Ferrari will speak to her contribution Alas (water in the pipes ruined reception completely) in Edge Effects. Interrupted by the last transmissions of the audio work in the gallery space on the closing day of the exhibition, Ferrari will present a selection of archival records (facts and fictions) that shaped her research. Reading from appendixes, copyright notices, descriptions of “odd tapes” and via a peripatetic score, she invites the participants to join in a listening that is at once forwards and backwards. She’ll ask questions such as: what is an “anti-administration ‘Gregorian chant’”? “How far can dissent go”?

Elisa Ferrari’s sound- and performance-based practice is concerned with the ethics of retrieval. In Alas (water in the pipes ruined reception completely), a series of sonic interventions created specifically for the Gibson’s inauguration, Ferrari works with early cassette tapes from the SFU Archives, recorded between 1967 and 1971 by Dennis Roberts, SFU’s first Information Officer. The tapes document office conversations, dictated press releases, anti-administration chants, public speeches, radio interviews, and union negotiations, making audible a period of student dissent that emerged within the context of transnational civil rights movements—as well as an existing institutional dissonance at SFU—which led to the repressive use of force on campus. Engaging with questions of labour, materiality, acoustics, and resonance, Ferrari combines fragments of this taped material with sounds recorded during listening sessions at the Gibson during its construction. Then, using musical prompts and instruction-based scores, she invited three musicians to respond to ideas of repetition, variation, and second thoughts within their own improvisatory practices, invoking the American poet Joan Retallack’s concept of “swerving,” described as “sometimes gentle, often violent out-of-the-blue motions that cut obliquely across material and conceptual logics…”. Ferrari arranges excerpts from the resulting recordings, together with samples of Roberts’ tapes, into sonic interludes that are audible in the Gibson at various points throughout the day. Alas (water in the pipes ruined reception completely) reinterprets the radiophonic format of the PSA (Public Service Announcement) to serve as both a warning and an invitation to alertness. 

The artist wishes to thank the Gibson Art Museum staff; her collaborators John Brennan, Hank Bull and Liam Murphy; SFU Archivist Matthew Lively; SFU School for the Contemporary Arts Music and Sound faculty; and SFU Librarian Sylvia Roberts. This project was realized with the generous support of SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts.