Frances Young, Song of Farewell, 2007
SD video (PAL), single channel video projection, aspect ratio 4:3, colour with stereo sound. 4 min 58 sec
Courtesy the David and Indrė Roberts Collection
There is a cyclical nature to Frances Young’s Song of Farewell. The rollercoaster carts that presumably race around those tight bends are fixed on a looped track. Where there would usually be the rattle of wheels and screams of joy whooshing past, those noises are now merely imagined in the eerie calm, as the tracks are deserted of human activity. Instead, a large swarm of starlings perform their group choreography as dusk falls and the light is rapidly changing. Their murmuration — or swarm behaviour that sees the group swirl and swoop across the sky like a shapeshifting black cloud — has been slowed down, focusing on the moment the starlings first descend and then depart en masse from the tracks. In rest, they line up in a relatively orderly fashion, mirroring the neat rows of flashing bulbs that call out for attention in the empty fairground. As they sit side by side, the birds almost resemble the individual cars that join up to form the trains that would race across the circuit.
Starlings are migratory birds, sometimes flying up to 80km/h and covering up to 1,500 km (930 mi) in their flight, returning to the same spots each year. The repetition in their flight patterns forms another loop. This promise of repetition is echoed in the soundscape, which is created by capturing the end-static when a vinyl record plays out. It is the noise of a temporary end, waiting to be flipped around or started over. The sound is looped, slowly getting darker and louder, creating a beat that transitions from what sounds like the slow thumping over train tracks to the flapping of many powerful wings, until the rhythm fades into the distance.
The final loop is the video work itself. When shown in an exhibition context it will play in a seamless loop, underlining the structures of repetition that Young is examining. As the sky fluctuates between an almost sea green to dusty blue and a dark purple, night never fully falls, the birds never completely settle and abandonment of the fairground does not get resolved, but it is a pleasant ride to be on.