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Ela Orleans / Lunar Odyssey / Summer 2018 Project Report Lunar Odyssey : Ela Orleans Report written by Petra Pennington, September 2020 PROJECT REPORT 1. Introduction / The Project 2. The Artist 3. Events Friday Lunch: Ela Orleans, Music for Ears Guided Walk to the White Wood Huntly Folk Club at Harry’s Sound, Image & Place conference Premiere screening of Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes Subsequent screenings of film 4. Marketing 5. Education / Outreach Programme Lunar Odyssey Artist’s Talk Lunar Odyssey Day at Gordon Schools Artist’s visits to the Tin Hut and Huntly Folk Club sessions Artist’s visit to Huntly Mart 6. Events Statistics 7. Media 8. Evaluation 9. Legacy 10. Funding and Thanks 11. Appendices Appendix A – The evolution of a project proposal Appendix B – Ela Orleans in Conversation with Petra Pennington Appendix C - Deveron Express newsletter articles about Lunar Odyssey Appendix D - Poster, flyer and programmes from Sound, Image & Place conference Appendix E - Michael Pattison’s talk from Sound, Image & Place conference Appendix F - Prof Pete Stollery’s talk from Sound, Image & Place conference Appendix G - Maja Zeco’s provocation cards from her Sound Walk at Sound, Image & Place conference Appendix H - Abby Beatrice Quick’s photographs from Sound, Image & Place conference 1. Introduction / The Project Sounds for a future society From June to September 2018, Polish audio-visual composer, Ela Orleans, was resident in Huntly, listening. In 300 years, what will our local language sound like? Will the same birds sound be heard in and around Huntly? Will there be a town? Will we be thriving or even surviving? Through the production of electronic music, video and a timeless language of symbols, Lunar Odyssey engaged us with our increasingly alien past culture before it is lost, and asks us to consider how we preserve and develop it to survive the unknown journey of our future. In response to the White Wood, Ela was to create an audio-visual time capsule to capture the sound of the past 100 years of the town and its lands, within the present-day framework of her electronic composition. Like Huntly’s own Voyager Gold Record, it was to preserve and project our aural culture forwards into the time and space of an uncertain future. Lunar Odyssey aims to document local Scots and Doric language tied to the people and land, folksong, and sounds of the ecology – all of which have been threatened as the twentieth century progressed into the present. Lunar Odyssey was a part of Ela’s’ PhD research at the music department at the University of Glasgow, for which she gained a Scottish Arts and Humanities Graduate School scholarship. The project reached its conclusion in October 2019, with the completion and premiere of the artist’s audio-visual film, Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes, alongside a conference exploring project themes. 2. The Artist Electronic musician, composer and audio-visual artist, Ela Orleans - originally from Poland - is a celebrated and published artist in the field of electronica and pop. Her albums have received the critics’ choice Dead Albatross Music Prize and been shortlisted for Scottish Album of the Year. Having lived and worked in Poland, New York and Glasgow, she has scored for movies and performed and DJ-ed internationally. In the summer of 2018, Orleans was resident in Huntly to work on Lunar Odyssey - a project exploring the audio-visual past and future of the town and its White Wood, as part of her PhD at the University of Glasgow. https://elaorleans.com/ 3. Events Friday Lunch: Ela Orleans, Music for Ears On Friday 8 June 2018, Orleans gave an introduction to her musical, audio-visual and research work at one of our weekly Friday Lunches in the Brander kitchen. It was a chance for people from varied backgrounds to initially meet the artist and ask questions about the project themes. The event provided a springboard for further organic links to be made between the community and the Lunar Odyssey project. Guided Walk to the White Wood This summer solstice walk on 21 June was to be an elaboration of Orleans’ research into the soundscape and experience of the White Wood. The route trod the path which the artist had been considering scoring with a soundtrack, from the centre of Huntly out to into the countryside and up to the White Wood. The walk was led by Neil Theodoreson, Forestry Commission Community & Education Ranger for Aberdeenshire & Moray with insight into the local ecology. Unfortunately, Ela could not be present for the walk, having sustained an injury to her knee, although the event continued and was well attended. Huntly Folk Club at Harry’s To mark the end of Orleans’ residency, a farewell evening took place during the monthly Huntly Folk Club on Wednesday 15 August. The folk club - many of whom met and worked with the artist throughout the summer - met at Harry’s Bar, and it was an opportunity for relaxed discussion about the project themes, for the artist to record some final material, thank the musicians, and to jam. Sound, Image & Place conference It was decided that the final presentation of the work started through Ela Orleans’ Lunar Odyssey project would be framed by a full 1 ½ days’ conference in October 2019, exploring the project themes of soundscaping, audio-place-making and the relationship between sound and visuals. Speakers included Professor Pete Stollery (University of Aberdeen), audio-visual artist Maja Zećo, and Creative Director of Alchemy Film & Arts, Michael Pattison. (Dr Louise Harris, University of Glasgow, was also due to speak but could not attend.) Programmed events included talks, discussions over meals catered by the Neep & Okra Kitchen, a sound walk of Huntly curated and led by Maja Zećo, and a projective walk imagining the layers of past and future cultural sounds of the town and ecology, led by Petra Pennington and Steve Brown. The immersive audio-visual and archival nature of Orleans’ work led to the conference being included in two north-east festivals; Sound Scotland and Across the Grain. Premiere screening of Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes The final audio-visual film work of Ela Orleans’ Lunar Odyssey residency was premiered on the evening of 24 October 2019, at Huntly Golf Club. After a curated selection of folk songs sung by Gaye Anthony, the film was introduced by Michael Pattison. Orleans conducted musicians Aaron Clark (accordion), Miguel M Padilla (flute) and Triple (3 piece acapella vocals) in a specially arranged additional live soundtrack to the film. Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes features a wistful series of interviews intercut with a shimmering blend of archival imagery and footage and sound recorded during Orleans’ 2018 Huntly residency. The effect is a multi-layered collision of past and present; a rich tapestry of sentiments, relationships between sounds, sights, people and place. This ‘time capsule’ is an immersive filmic experience, rather like absorbing the sonic narratives of distant engine hums, human footsteps passing, the wind-borne rustling of leaves, and the immediacy and clarity of birdsong, as the dappled sunlit shadows and colours of the White Wood or avenue of Huntly’s linden trees fall into your eyes. Interviewees included former Huntly Cinema projectionist, the late Gordon McTavish, Barry Peter Ould of the Percy Grainger Society, White Wood forester and folk musician Steve Brown, and Deveron Projects’ Claudia Zeiske and Robyn Wolsey. As part of the evening’s programme, Huntly-based performance group Dudendance also showed selected films with live musical accompaniment by Argentinian composer Fabiana Galante, and Triple. A Q&A session followed for the artists. Subsequent screenings of film Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes has also been screened at a community event held at 22/23 The Square in December 2019. Further screenings have been discussed, including the possibility of showing the film in the White Wood - the original inspiration for Orleans’ Lunar Odyssey residency. Non-project events While resident in Huntly, Orleans took part in other Deveron Projects events. On 25 June she led a Food Chain cookery workshop as part of our HOME programme, showing locals how to make her family recipe for Polish Barszcz (beetroot soup), Pierogi (cabbage dumplings) and Kompot (a fruit drink made with seasonal berries). Orleans also joined the Back O Bennachie bus tour as part of Refugee Festival Scotland, where women and children from both Syrian New Scots and ‘local’ communities visited cultural sites from coast to hilltop fort, exchanging friendship, food, song and dance along the way. 4. Marketing Press ● The Autumn 2018 edition of the Deveron Express ‘Local Lunar Odyssey’ featured a critically-positioned editorial on the front cover, comparing Orleans’ audio-visual time capsule project to ‘Huntly’s own Voyager Gold Record’. The article drew likeness between the unknown cultural, ecological and lingual future of Huntly’s next 300 years, and the depths of unexplored space into which the iconic NASA probe carried examples of Earth’s cultural identity. In the same periodical, Ela Orleans was interviewed by Art & Community Worker Petra Pennington about her time in Huntly, her working processes and the future context of local folk music. ● Several articles publicised the Sound, Image and Place conference to a local audience through the Huntly Express across the 3 weeks run-up to the event. These took different angles of focus/interest, from the academic themes of the conference, to the premiere performance-screening featuring live local musicians, to the film Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes being dedicated to the memory of the late Gordon McTavish, Huntly cinema projectionist whose local archival footage features heavily in the final film. A quarter- page advert for the conference and screening also reached local audiences. ● BBC Radio Scotland’s Janice Forsyth interviewed Ela Orleans about the Sound, Image and Place events, including the screening of Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes, for broadcast on The Afternoon Show during the week of the events.

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