SUSAN MORRIS

Susan Morris remarks: In late Spring 2020 I was invited to take over the Instagram account of the Kunsthaus Centre d’Art Pasquart in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. The gallery itself had been closed for an indefinite period, along with almost everything else during what we now think of as the first wave of the COVID-19 global pandemic. I decided to use my phone to record and post a short video on the hour, every hour; to build a record of a day that would be, as André Breton once said of his own experimental writing, like a door ‘left ajar’ until completed. That is not to say there was no structure for the 24-hour piece – I had planned very carefully where I would be filming at each hour. Aside from two instances of music added from an external source, however, the actual content was left open to chance. For each 60-second post I very quickly wrote a caption – time was of the essence – collaging my own writing with snippets from books, emails, text messages and the day’s news from the radio. On my night walks I caught bells ringing from the clocks of shuttered churches and public announcements at deserted railway stations. My intention was to displace the “I” wherever possible – to cast doubt on who’s actually doing the speaking (or the walking, or the filming).

I had planned to make this piece on 26 April 2020, but my cat died very suddenly on the 21st. I was so grief-stricken that I postponed everything until the following week. Even then I could barely speak about him. This brings me to a note about the quality of sound in the recordings. Many consist of me reading from my own jottings in response to the day’s events as they unfolded, and when I listen to them now, my voice sounds strange to me, but reflective of the situation we were in during those months of lockdown. I was anxious about the pandemic, and about my own ambition. Having started the day declaring boldly that I was going to do it, I worried I would not have the stamina, sufficient network coverage or a good-enough phone battery to see it through. On top of all that, I knew that I was relying on some sort of ‘essential serendipity’. For instance, while filming at an otherwise deserted Liverpool Street Station, I knew when something ‘lucky’ happened: a person walked into frame.

The 24 captions I wrote that day are published here alongside a single still from each video. On the vinyl record, you can hear the 24 segments of recorded sound. There is also a film made up of the 24 short video posts, available in the Journal Page (see link below). This could all have remained on Instagram alone, but as our distance from that particular time grows, I feel more strongly the need to preserve something of it.