Master Rock is available to listen to below. It is preceded by a short introduction from the artist. It is also available to stream or download from Soundcloud.
Audio: Master Rock
42 minutes 17 seconds
Master Rock
Never pass one conversation the whole time we are down here. Haven't a spare breath except for work. Can't even hear so much as ourselves breathing. Effing and blinding, and worse even the whole time but. Do you know how we know that? We'll tell you how we know that, for drilling up close we can see by the way mouths move. Drilling's our conversation. – John Mulholland, tunnel tiger, in Master Rock
This book comprises extracts from the script of the radio production alongside extensive archival imagery. Previously out of print, a limited number of copies are now available to be purchased. All proceeds from the sale of this limited release are donated to Medical Aid for Palestine by the artist and Book Works.
- Co-published by Artangel and Book Works, as part of Co-series, No. 11
- Designed by A Practice for Everyday Life
- Edition of 1,250, 92pp
- Duotone
- Hard cover
- 210 x 135 mm
- ISBN: 9781906012748
Talk: Maria Fusco in conversation with Joanna Walsh
41 minutes 20 seconds
Talk: Maria Fusco in conversation with Joanna Walsh
To coincide with the London launch of Maria Fusco's book Master Rock, the writer was joined in conversation with fellow author Joanna Walsh. Exploring a range of issues including the importance of site, the space of radio, and writing for voices, Fusco and Walsh's conversation is interspersed with short excerpts featuring the different voices in Master Rock.
In association with Artangel and Book Works, the event was presented as part of Cutting an Object Into Slices: A Series of Lectures on Creative Critical Writing organised by Dr. Kristen Kreider for the Practice-based PhD Programme at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Recorded in Swedenborg Hall at the Swedenborg Society London, on Wednesday May 4 2016. Audio produced by Chalk & Blade
The talk is is also available to listen to on Soundcloud.
Image: Cruachan Power Station at the inaugural performance of Master Rock, 15 October 2015. Photograph: Robert Ormerod
Maria Fusco
Maria Fusco was selected as part of the 2014 Open call for proposals from Artangel and BBC Radio 4 and as a result produced Master Rock in 2015.
Fusco is a Belfast-born writer now based in Glasgow. She works across an interdisciplinary field of writing including fiction, criticism and theory, her work is translated into ten languages. Solo-authored books include With A Bao A Qu: Reading When Attitudes Become Form (Los Angeles/Vancouver: New Documents, 2013), GONDA (Berlin/New York: Sternberg Press, 2012), and The Mechanical Copula (Berlin/New York: Sternberg Press, 2011).
She is the founder/editor of The Happy Hypocrite, a journal for and about experimental writing and was Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She was the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Whitechapel Gallery, is a Hawthornden Fellow, was awarded as a Jerwood Creative Catalyst and named as one of Canongate's Future 40. She is currently Professor at Northumbria University, Visiting Professor at Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach am Main, Frankfurt (2018-2021) and Research Fellow at Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam.
Find out more about Fusco's work on her website: mariafusco.net
Images: (left) Maria Fusco during the production of Master Rock, September 2015. Photograph: Martin Clark; (above) Maria Fusco by Ross Fraser McLean / StudioRoR.
Fusco's interpretation...activates archetypes, rendering the construction of the station and its channelling of the elements as a primal confrontation with embodied forces. – David Keenan, The Wire, February 2016
Fusco's interpretation...activates archetypes, rendering the construction of the station and its channelling of the elements as a primal confrontation with embodied forces. – David Keenan, The Wire, February 2016
At the heart of Fusco’s radio play is the question of the unseen. Cruachan is all but invisible to the external eye but the mountain conceals a turbine hall the size of a football pitch and a 19km network of tunnels and pipes. – Moira Jeffrey, a-n, 16 October 2015
The following words explore how accent and dialect might be shaped by physical forces and how, within Master Rock, they become solid and abrasive through the actors’ delivery...The voice of the granite is multi-layered, musical, and sounds like a force grappling to harmonise many voices. – Claire Walsh, Map Magazine, 11 December 2015
They continue to work... their voices, notionally independent yet in concert, knead, manipulate and tease out something unfinished. – James Gormley, This Is Tomorrow, 22 December 2015
“Is it possible to shape that which you haven’t seen?” Fusco asks us. Master Rock is about the conundrum of the unseen and the unseeable and thus also about the urgent telling of hidden histories. – Moira Jeffrey, The Scotsman, 16 October 2015
Written and directed by Maria Fusco
Composition by Olivier Pasquet
Performed by Denise Riley as the voice of Elizabeth Falconer, Lalor Roddy as the voice of the tunnel tiger and Ceylan Hay as the voice of the granite
Project Manager: Sinéad McCarthy
Production Manager: Nick Millar
Lighting Designer: Nich Smith
Stage Manager: Carrie Taylor
Sound Engineer: Alex McNutt
Lighting Engineer: Grahame Gardner
Rigging: Kevin Murray
Produced for BBC Radio 4 by Somethin' Else
Producer: Joby Waldman
Sound Engineer: Eloise Whitmore
Biographies
Olivier Pasquet is a composer, music producer and visual artist currently based in Berlin and Paris, where he has been part of the IRCAM team at the Pompidou Centre for the past 15 years.
Professor Denise Riley was born in 1948 in Carlisle. She is Professor of the History of Ideas and of Poetry at the University of East Anglia and an author of both poetry and philosophical works.
Lalor Roddy was born in 1954 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is an actor, known for Hunger (2008), Grabbers (2012 and The 18th Electricity Plan (2006).
Ceylan Hay is a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, currently studying for a Masters in Music at University of Edinburgh.
Image: Olivier Pasquet (left) at the sound desk during the inaugural performance of Master Rock, 15 October 2015. Photograph: Robert Ormerod
Credits
Commissioned by Artangel and BBC Radio 4, presented in association with Scottish Power, and supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.
Artangel is generously supported by Arts Council England and the private patronage of the Artangel International Circle, Special Angels and The Company of Angels.