I don’t know what the water wanted.* 

Songs as Process /Practice as Movement 

 

 

Wednesday 8 Sep 2021

Room 167, RHB, Goldsmiths University

3-5pm (drop-in event)

 

‘The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing.’ – Jacques Derrida

 

This multimedia performance installation is a presentation and continuation of unfinished work. It marks the culmination of Bea Redweik’s postgraduate practice research project (MMus Creative Practice) ‘Songs as Process / Practice as Movement’. Asking the question ‘How does not finishing affect the process of making?’ this research aims to complicate the idea of a work being a fixed thing – the recording. Through valuing, interrogating and affirming process in song-based music, we may interrupt our understanding of artistic practice. Maybe the work is the making – and practice is continuous, is movement. 

 

With a focus on the everyday and an emphasis on anti-mastery, Bea Redweik entered a self-experiment (from 1 July 2021 to 15 August 2021) instantiating her songwriting practice 5 days a week and filming the entire process. Five songs emerged as sites of exploration, yet they do not represent completion; they remain open, changeable. 

 

To show artistic practice as multimodal and rhizomatic rather than linear, these five songs will be further explored as part of this multimedia performance installation: a live songwriting session that is interwoven with video material showing process from this summer’s self-experiment. 

 

5 process songs:

• I wish I had a garden (vocals and guitar)

• Here (vocals and guitar)

• Fever (vocals and guitar)

• Honesty (vocals and piano)

• More Time (vocals and guitar)

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*Title taken from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric