Vanessa Rossetto

"In fall 2014, I spent some time in New York City in preparation for a performance. During this time, I recorded as close to continually as I could given normal human and mechanical shortcomings – an SD card runs out of room, a battery dies, a person wakes too groggy to check the recorder or, in a flurry of activity, leaves it dormant. After a time, you start to forget the device is even there which is of course the purpose but also interacts in its own way with the frailties of human memory – if you forget it’s there you forget to check to make sure it’s functioning properly. Despite all that, at the end of the allotted time I was left with a large volume of recorded material that took me longer than I’d have liked to comb through, sort, assess and determine a structural framework around which I could wind bits of this straw into something resembling a form. In all this record of whirlwind events, I found myself most drawn to the moments at rest, in between overt actions and dialogue, and it was out of these that I constructed the majority of these pieces. It so happened that during the time of recording I was already collapsing into an unprecedentedly long, deep and unbroken depressive state. As so often can happen, the document I had planned to make and set out to make is not the one I ended up making. It couldn’t be. I believe that is reflected in the decision to form these pieces out of the absences and interstices – the pauses, misfirings, missing pieces, long sleeps and synaptic gaps and, of course, the way they make me feel. (Vanessa Rossetto,  April 2016)