Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller: Night Walk for Edinburgh

The image of the street comes up on the iPod screen. It appears that it has been shot in the exact location that you are standing in, almost as if it is in real time. A figure walks past on the video as another passes by in the real world, the two realities aligning. The sounds from the headphones are startlingly three- dimensional, further merging the two worlds in front of you. A female voice close behind you says: ‘I think we should get started. Walk with me…’
Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller returned to Edinburgh to make one of the mesmerising video walks for which they are acclaimed throughout the world. Following Cardiff’s voice and walking in her footsteps, you will be led through the backstreets of the Old Town, unravelling a disjointed tale - part game-playing, part surrealistic poetry, perhaps even a murder mystery - layered with history, invention and memories.
This work has was commissioned by the Fruitmarket and is now part of the Gallery’s permanent collection and will be restaged regularly. Acquired by the Fruitmarket with Art Fund support.
It was first presented in partnership with Edinburgh International Festival and in association with Edinburgh Art Festival from 25 July - 25 August 2019.
Supported by
The Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller Commission Circle
Royal Mile: Dasha Shenkman OBE, Nick Thomas
Old Assembly: Melanie Reid
Advocates: Sophie Crichton Stuart, Fiona and Kenny Cumming, Sarah and Gerard Griffin, Catherine Muirden and Werner Keschner, William Zachs and Martin Adam

[@trip-report]

"You should be at the bottom of Advocate's Close looking out at cockburn Street with your book to the steps. There's a dumpstere in front of me right now or a skip as they call it here. This should be your right ear - and this should be your left ear." - I reakky like the idea of the viewer having to collage the scenes together and make meaning. What were trying to do is show different scenes , and different charactersa of scenes and then by the time you get the end you have all these scenes in your head as a viewer and perhaps you remember some of them or just pieces of some of them. Its sort of the way when you wake ip un the morning and you recall a dream. And i think that dream structures is very very important. And i think surrealism has always been really super important to us. - I think it's like choreography , the walks. How we choreograph them is by shooting a lot of test footage and then we go, okay we need... we see something happen in certain scene and then we say we want that to happen again, so we get the extras we need to redo that. - We plan taht we can go through spaces that affect the person's body in different ways. Like a narrow alley will make you feel a bit weird and then an open space. It's like if you're making a drawing you want texture, you want a certain type of line and then you want darkness, you want light. - When you're working on an edited piece like a walk, invariably fifty to seventy-five percent of the script gets thrown out because it just doesn't always work. And so, Janet writes way more than we need usually. Well, it's pretty hard because what happens is, we do visit the site, and I respond to the environment, and I start writing things. And then, I visit again and take that script onto site, so some lines, when you're voicing them don't work at all. And then, when it's starting to be shot, that adds another layer that you figure out intuitively if it works or not.

[@trivialnonsense]

Really cool