Take My Shoes versions # 2009, 2011, 2012
Raewyn Turner 2012
Take My Shoes #2
Experimental Documentary 2012
Duration 12.25 minutes
Protected by anonymity a senior police officer talks freely about the changing aspects of violence in New Zealand.
The work explores knitting together an intarsia of written and aural fragments of topical issues and their relationship to news media. The audio orientation of the work relates to the topical and often confrontational territory inhabited by talk back radio.
A graphical programming environment for video and audio manipulation was used to digitally activate the text via the narrator's gestures.
In a monologue towards understanding the increase in violent offencses, intimidation, abuse, threats and the high rate of domestic violence in New Zealand, a senior ex-police officer talks about contributing factors. His concerns echo the community's fears with reference to inequity and violence in a small paradise. Protected by anonymity the police officer talks freely about the changing aspects of violence in New Zealand; his secret identity indicates the fragility of a community where police protection of individuals and themselves may only further violence.
Recorded, manipulated and edited by Raewyn Turner.
Voice and Hands: Anonymous senior Police Officer
Sound Chord : Eddie Rayner
Take My Shoes version#1
Experimental Documentary 2011
Duration 13.10 mins
A graphical programming environment for video and audio manipulation was used to digitally activate the text via the narrator's gestures and voice.
In a monologue towards understanding the increase in violent offenses, intimidation, abuse, threats and the high rate of domestic violence in New Zealand, a senior ex-police officer talks about contributing factors. His concerns echo the community's fears with reference to inequity and violence in a small paradise. Protected by anonymity the police officer talks freely about the changing aspects of violence in New Zealand; his secret identity indicates the fragility of a community where police protection of individuals and themselves may only further violence.
Woven into the text are fragments from the World News along with an imaginative account of early European settlement of NZ and grandmother's stories glimpsed through contemporary eyes. The settlers’ journey and subsequent description of the city skyline visualizes how the secret folds of the newly created city and environs contribute to the citizens concerns. The settlers cut down the trees and expose bare hills which echo their words.
Recorded, manipulated and edited by Raewyn Turner.
Voice and Hands: Anonymous senior Police Officer
Sound Chord : Eddie Rayner
Take My Shoes. Raewyn Turner ©
I am in this place and the new automated targeting system will pick up all the aliens and what they’ve had for in-flight meals. Even when I wear a one ounce
gold krugerrand
around my neck
I don't feel safe
my mobile in my hand
my credit card in my bra
the witness thought the gunman holding up the bank guards
was a training exercise he forced the guards to the ground
to the ground the same ground that held up the other people that have walked around New Zealand Bishop Sneddon, my grandmother Maria Angelica who
rode on a steamboat
seated at the point where the aft and the starboard met
arriving on her 17th birthday with her husband. A dowry farine
a goat capra
a grapevine iona
propelled by the 3rd wave of new settlers and a promise
to mother
upon her approach to the shores of her new life she heard the silvery sound of birdsong
two sounds for every sound.
Maria Maria
Angelica Angelica
as she was giving birth to her fifth child her mother appeared in a vision at the foot of her bed. Her mother’s death and her son’s birth were intertwined into the passage of entry and exit from the world. Entwined.
The city of sails was built by white settlers who sailed from a motherland and built houses made from the wood of local trees.
They cut down the trees and burnt the bush leaving bare hills
bare hills
Every sound and movement of persons and goods is answered from the hills by a similar sound returned on a river of wave forms. the two sounds of life co-exist always travelling in opposite directions, across the sea of air
into dreams
every sound that is made in the new country is repeated in an echo that bounces back from bare hills. the deflected sound is heard sometimes three or four times in quick succession.
bare hills
bare hills
the settlers know that each of their words will be echoed across the nation, caught sometimes in the net of media and pinned screaming from headlines in
newspapers.
meanwhile naked folded hills take up the sounds turning them around tourniquet tightly
split into packets
little gifts of information.
At times the echoes increase a sound’s value, at times it seems that the echoes are more real than their sources ; not everything that seems to be deeply meaningful, like poetry read out loud, singing, and the moans of lovers, maintains its force.
the residents are filled with emotions of Happiness Love Shame
Anger
warmed by the heat of concrete and ovens, computer terminals, water cisterns, swimming pools, air conditioning, bitumen roads, food factories
wishing for raindrops that fall singularly from rainbows
within them 360 degrees of purest objects
watched by seagulls on lamp posts.
Take My Shoes --first version-- 2009
Experimental Documentary duration 1.33. (4x3 VIDEO). Dolby Stereo A05.26
Synopsis: Take My Shoes refers to the gesture of gifting one’s shoes so that others may walk in them . The police officer, cast as the guardian of the general public, talks about attitudes and factors that seem to be contributing to violent offences in New Zealand. Inequities and violent offences are knitted together with distant world events that span the time period between 2001 and 2008. Woven into the text are fragments from the World News over the same period
Could we create a concept of basic human dignity that values and respects variable individuals, takes into account feelings of honour and humiliation, and recognizes the shame of poverty as well as the shame of wealth in our egalitarian, consumer society?
The video was created using Isadora, a graphical programming environment, and edited in Final Cut Pro.
World News 31.1.08