In collaboration with the City of London, Nonclassical presents 66 Days – a digital multimedia project marking 400 years since the Mayflower sailed to America. We spoke with Lola de la Mata about her collaboration, creative process and how her piece will explore the themes of journeys, migration and cultural identities.
About the artists
Lola de la Mata
Associate Composer Lola de la Mata is a London born French/Spanish composer, artist and musician (violin/voice/electronics). Her collaborative practice explores the experienced as embodied sound through the relationships between the bodies of the instrument, the performer and the architecture. Lola likes to challenge the one directional concert experience by placing performers around the ‘concert space’, writing for the body of the musician as well as the instrument for a more embodied sound. Her scores have been performed by Cecilia Bignall, Ensemble Entropy, Tre Voci, Distractfold Ensemble, and a CoMA trio featuring Aisha Orazbayeva. Lola’s music has been broadcasted on BBC Radio 3 and Resonance FM.
Britta Thie
Britta Thie is a director, artist, actor and model based in Germany. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at Anthology Film Archives, (New York), Mumok (Vienna), Auto Italia (London), the Sandy Brown Gallery (Berlin), the KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), the Kunstverein Göttingen, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the Julia Stoschek Collection Berlin.
What ideas are you hoping to explore in this project? How does it relate back to the themes of journeys, migration and cultural identities?
Teleportation Already Exists - just not the way we thought it would. Through our screens there is a migration of the Mind and not of the Body. We are exploring the idea of ‘ironed time’ by focusing our research onto the façade of screens and ways to disrupt the flatness we all interact with.
What elements will you be using, and how do you envisage your project coming together?
Speaking with Britta who had just finished filming a TV series as an actress, she became interested in the behind the scenes – things that ‘hang out’ on standby. We decided looking into her B-Roll from her previous films shot in malls, car parks and electronics stores would be a good starting point. ‘Badly framed’ moments or sections that were blurred or at the ‘wrong’ angle started us off on our path with screens and flatness.
For the sound, I want to make a lot with only two sources: we are going to record our own voices reading and singing texts (written in collaboration) – which I will distort, blend and stretch. The aim is to collide intimate raw voices with crushed digital voices, sound stemming from a 'real' alive source and us then processed using a screen.
How do you anticipate materialising your project? Are there any particular processes or methods you'll be using?
We begin separately – Britta is looking through her B-Roll while I focus my research on screens, cells and bacteria. We will then come together to share words, phrase fragments, and start to record these as samples from which I will develop sounds and rhythms. These are sent back and forth between Britta and I as they are attached to film fragments. Once we feel an edit has found a shape, we will then write a text to include voice-overs in German, English and French, to add a layer pointing to intangible spaces between translation.
Watch the works created by our Associate Composers with collaborators for the 66 Days project.