MATTY ROODT, MEGHAN HO-TONG, LUCIENNE BESTALL | Chorus

In Chorus, fiction lends to architecture an alternative retelling. Taking as site a modernist Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church) set in the mountains of South Africa, the imagined narrative augments the otherworldly qualities of the structure and its landscape, abstracting it from historical specificity to offer new considerations. The film recalls how the voices that once belonged to the congregation became freed from the bodies that housed them, occupying the interior of the building with their song. Architecture becomes score, offering prompts sung by a local choir for the film’s soundscape and reinterpreting this structure of dominion with novel subtlety.
Matty Roodt, Meghan Ho-Tong and Lucienne Bestall live and work in Cape Town, South Africa. An artist, architect and writer (among other things), their collaborative practice extends narrative filmmaking as a research methodology to think through gendered power relationships in the built environment. Chorus is their second film.