I Tried Calling

Essay on I Shoved and I Dug and I Hacked Away with Morgan Quaintance
Screened during FIELD RECORDINGS 3
Autor hera chan
Published march 30, 2023

Between the dial tones, colleagues leave messages for Bella on the answering machine. Last September at WORM, Morgan Quaintance presented the programme I Shoved and I Dug and I Hacked Away, including work-in-progress Repetitions (2022), commissioned and supported by Field Recordings, Documenting Complexity, and WORM. The invitation at the time described what lived on the surface: retinal excitement, state of anticipation, industrial work, fragile bodies. Its description makes no greater claims yet elicits an invitation into a 21-minute 45-second journey of feelings. We hear recordings of what is left unanswered at Bella’s, asking when she will come back to work. We imagine the shape of where the messages come from: an employee of the 21st century calling from a tabletop dialup at an office, the factory floor, or the kitchen of a diner. Perhaps the equipment and furniture is anachronistic, themed to an era. The sensation of what it means to work now and refuse to work now override the recordings of correspondences that don’t get through.

Still from I shoved and I Dug and I Hacked Away
The image and inductive sound design draws us in without sharing her secrets. At times, the instrumentation sounds like bells tolling, time on a relentless march forward. In response, we hear the voice of an American labour organizer who calls for hazard pay, medical benefits, and protection when working during the pandemic. She demands justice for Anita Tanay. Another woman smiles at us from still images, more still than any other in this work. I can’t help feeling I’ve seen her before. The course of the programme ran like this, not nostalgic but with the uneasy sensation of déjà vu. In the Practicing Refusal Collective, founded by Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman, Campt unpacks a series of keywords that “define the contours of an emergent black visuality” such as “still-moving-images,” which “hover between still and moving.” In engaging with the reality of now, Repetitions draws portraits of mouths moving with intention, in a direction that is never revealed. Scenes become eternal, as is the transience inherent in unprotected labour relations, with Bella and Anita captured in the in-between.
When I visited London later that year, Morgan and I took a walk around Chinatown, and he showed me an alley he had been spending time in. A split memory, the humidity hovered high, streets slick with blue oil, and weathered red lanterns pined away on old wires. The impressions I had from his screening came back to me, with the intimacy among strangers that he brings to the screen mirroring that of the cinema. His works can be experimental takes on psychological dramas that are voiced from our own insides. They are conditional texts, a call that can expect no response. On July 13, 1935, The Spokesman Review reported from Washington that between two to three million chain letters were held in Dead Letter Offices across the United States. The unreceived letter is intimate yet impersonal, a hit and miss lost without their object of affection.

In Letters from Sapporo (2021), Quaintance makes a collage with footage from 16 workshop participants that were filmed on smartphones during the pandemic. In Letter from Dakar (2019), he interviews grassroots cultural organizers in Senegal, with a critical take on the Museum of Black Civilizations. In Letter from Tokyo (2018), there is a similar survey of cultural politics from the city in the leadup to the 2020 Olympic Games. These works, though not all shown in this programme, strike differently, and place Quaintance in scene through his conversations wih the interviewees. The focus on organizing from the ground up remains a throughline, and they are cast as a series of letters from. A message to the world and in sharp contrast to Quaintance’s writing as a critic of the systemic ills of the UK art sector, serious irreverence as a musician, and formal qualities as an art educator, Repetitions and the other works in the programme at WORM leave us wondering if we were, after all, the intended recipient of his missives.

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