Requiem for Edward Snowden
Review by Javier Burón
Images by Simona Bisiani
Seen by more than 100 people at the Arts Centre Theatre of Aberdeen, as part of the Sound Festival, the audio visual chronicle of a death foretold represented the most original, experimental and eclectic mixture of graphic arts and music. 'Requiem for Edward Snowden' is never a 'nice', 'beautiful' play; the authors don't want to please the audience. Their aim as artists goes far beyond: disturbing, altering and touching our dormant consciousness as an alternative to the official message we always hear. To the 'only message'. Thus it is an audio visual dystopia not about the future, as Orwell or Huxley warned; the dystopia that Jules Rawlinson and Matthew Collings present is already here, but hidden, as we voluntarily put cameras in front of us, as we collect and give freely the information about us, available to the ones who know how to get it.
It is in this context where Edward Snowden is erected as a XXI century martyr, in a postmodern world where religions are not the prosecuted ones, but the truth, the transparency and the right to know what our governments know about us and plan to do. And especially the everyday more old-fashioned right to have a privacy, the right to have secrets.
Therefore, the world introduced by the visual artist Jules Rawlinson is not naïve, colourful as we are used to seeing in popular representations (movies, adverts, video clips...). What we see and listen to is a dark subterranean and parallel reality unavailable to our quotidian eyes, buried in cables and unearthed by intelligence agencies in buildings like the ones where Snowden himself used to work. The eager spies who inhabit the Net, their craving to collect data, either by video cameras, Internet, social networks, wiretapping, is the constant for the visual part of this piece.
These images connect in an almost mystical way with the tense and oppressive music composed by Matthew Collings and perfectly performed by the violinist Emma Lloyd, the cellist Clea Friend and the clarinettist Pete Furniss. The classical instruments work together along with electronic sounds to create the darkest of atmospheres, harmonies and dissonances able to deconstruct our usually comfortable ears, used to easier melodies. The notes we listen to seem to lack a sense, like the sound of the random information, just like digits and letters surfing on the Net.
Displaying a total command of technique, they have been able to create something beyond the popular conception of music and video. Their greatest merit: transmitting and expressing all these feelings without words, just symbolism and connotation to represent this fight between men and almighty states. To honour the life of a man who is not dead yet, but whose life is now reduced to clandestine hotel rooms. To remind us what we can see everyday if we observe well: that humans are losing their humanity.
