LIGHTS OUT (2023)

Urban documentary series in Central London.

Looking for the invisible on the plutocratic streets of Knightsbridge.

➔ EXHIBITIONS

  • October 2023 - Group show - Agitate Gallery/Studies in Photography, Edinburgh, UK. 

  • August 2023 - Solo show/audio installation - Ramsgate Festival of Sound 2023 - Ramsgate, Kent, UK. Gallery exhibition (HOLD Creative Spaces) + outdoor installation with audio soundtrack + guest speaker Caroline Knowles (‘Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London’).

  • October 2022 - Video installation - Volkstheater, Vienna

➔ ‘SOUVENIR OF ENGLAND’(live music/visual theater)

  • April 2024 - two live dates at AckerStadt Palast, Berlin

  • October 2022 - Three live performances - Volkstheater,Vienna; Kit Cafe, Düsseldorf; Laboratorium, Stuttgart.

➔ KNIGHTSBRIDGE?

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% (J. Stiglitz)

Knightsbridge is a residential and international retail district bordering Hyde Park in central London. Dotted with embassies and exclusive gardens, anchored by Qatar-owned Harrods, and stretching between two legacy institutions, the Victoria & Albert Museum and Buckingham Palace, Knightsbridge is a haven for plundered and laundered cash.

In 2007, the world’s most expensive apartment sold in the One Hyde Park building. In this consumer paradise for oil-money scions, second (or third or tenth…) homes sit mostly vacant, ‘lights out’ year-round.

In this uneasy alliance between the native ‘mighty empire’ and the new owners of the SW1 postcode, wealth and power are glimpsed and divined, sublimed through ornamental layers and protective glass.

These stark monochrome images shun artifice and bling. Using only available light, they proffer a quiet resistance to the sirens of consumerism that parade these disquieting streets.

Further readings: Caroline Knowles’ great book ‘Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London’. Also Guardian 4.2023, Guardian 2013, MyLondon News 2022.

➔ PROJECT TIMELINE

This series was originally conceived as background visuals to my new stage show ‘Souvenir of England’, a live music project that premiered in - and was commissioned by - Vienna’s Volkstheater in October 2022. The show was inspired by director Joanna Hogg’s 2019 feature film ‘The Souvenir, Part 1’, set in Knightsbridge in the early 1980s to a soundtrack of that era’s protest pop/rock hits (including ‘Shipbuilding’, ‘Ghost Town’). After a few live dates, the show morphed into an album with Raphael Mann (release date fall 2023 tbc) and a photography series (ongoing) that premiered as a public installation in Ramsgate, Kent in August 2023 for Ramsgate Festival of Sound. The goal is to produce a book in 2024 and further exhibit the series in the UK and abroad.

SOUVENIR OF ENGLAND - stage production

➔ Inspired by Joanna Hogg's 2019 film 'The Souvenir, Part 1', this live music staged production 'Souvenir of England' radically recasts Hogg's tender coming-of-age story set in 1983 Knightsbridge, London as a meditation on England's legacy of wealth and power.

Conceived, sung and performed, and with photography & video by Marianne Dissard, the 70-minute multi-disciplinary show introduces three seasoned international performers: Dissard, with Berlin-based American dance legend Frank Willens (Falk Richter, Tino Sehgal), and UK-based American musician Art Terry (inspiration for Stew's Broadway rock musical 'Passing Strange'). They sing, play various instruments, converse, and perform rituals of 'Englishness' in a staging by French set designer Bastien Forestier (Jérôme Savary, Peter Lindbergh).

Musical director Raphael Mann re-imagines the film's soundtrack of 1980s British pop classics, including such masterpieces as The Specials' 'Ghost Town' & Robert Wyatt's 'Shipbuilding', making extensive use of sounds of metal hitting metal to evoke the docks and steelworks - the labour of metallurgy on which the 'mighty empire' was built.

”I was inspired to create this show, originally commissioned by Vienna's Volkstheater where it premiered in Oct. 2022, because of the years I spent in England from 2017.

Hogg's film doesn't spell these things out. It looks at life through a (literal) window. With 'Souvenir of England', I want our audience to step through that window, leap forward fourty years, and ponder how this country has changed, or hasn't, since 1983. And in doing so, remind ourselves that music has always provided anthems of resistance, and theatre tools to decipher our times.”- md