Singing The Mountain by Josephine Illingworth-Law
In the last weeks I have hiked over 200 km across the Dolomites to reach 15 bivacchi (high-altitude mountain huts), sleeping alone in these huts to record my experience of non-human to human interconnection. I studied and photographed traces of intimacy left behind in written guestbook entries, the donated food and firewood, books, and writing scrawled across the walls and ceiling, even meeting and interviewing the hikers whom I happened to spend a night alongside. With an audio-recorder, I captured voices of the mountain—wind, cowbells, an organ of chimes, strange birds, darkness, dogs, people, fire, and my own voice—, melodies and words that came to me while alone up there.
The resulting multimedia work centers around a sound piece, constructed from the voices I recorded in the bivacco: a tapestry of field recordings and my own voice, layered and twisted, which meld the sounds of the mountain into a ‘choir’. Alongside this is an anthology of photographs and poetry, created from the artifacts found on my hikes.
Josephine Illingworth-Law
Josephine Illingworth-Law (2001) is a 23-year-old artist from London, UK. Through sound, she investigates places where the human and non-human are entwined with unusual complexity, documenting what a refugee community, a village, or her own family can sound like. With an ethnographic approach, she collects field recordings, photographs, poetry, and writings, which form her telling of the story.
