The film's soundtrack opens with eight tolls of a bell. In fact, the loop-track opens with the first sentence of the film, and closes with the second one. The audio is a loop-track that samples and layers Jocelyn Pook's 'Requiem for a Queen' and her soundtrack for the filmed version of Mike Bartlett's play King Charles III. The footage used includes: an informative video published in 2020 by Business Insider outlining the planned protocol in the then future event of Queen Elizabeth II's death footage from the crowds gathering at Buckingham and Windsor between 8th September 2022 and the early hours of the following day the arrival of King Charles III to Buckingham Palace and some archival footage from The Queen's life. All this, and the fact the piece was created on the cusp of a series of events and processes of historic proportions (national mourning, proclamation of the new monarch, etc.), heightens the temporal and time-sensitive nature of the piece. The piece's duration is itself an endurance challenge to contemplate death, grieving, loss, mourning, and the seismic event of the 24 hours prior to the video's publication. It has only been either sped up or slowed down. Whilst the soundtrack is obsessively repetitive, despite what it might sometimes look like, none of the footage has been looped. Therefore this loop piece is intended, above all, as a condolence note to all those currently in mourning, and is a kind of love letter to mourning itself - in particular communal outpourings of grief. The most repeated phrase is the Latin 'Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis' - which means 'eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them'. It became the first in a series of five loop-pieces I created responding to this historic event. I began it as the UK and the world started to mourn the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and published it before King Charles III gave his first speech as monarch. In what I realise now was a kind of vigil/wake, this is a time-specific loop piece created between the evening of 8th and the following afternoon on 9th September 2022. The videos are soundtracked by loop-tracks created using samples taken from the Service for the Reception of the Coffin at Westminster Hall (14.09.22) the Prince's Vigil (18.09.22) the procession from Westminster Abbey to Wellington Arch (19.09.22) and Jocelyn Pook's 'Requiem for a Queen' (2014). The videos include footage gathered from news channels, as well as original footage, including documentation of two ritual-actions performed especially for the occasion. They are, in a sense, an extended 'memento mori'. Rather than directly focusing on the dead monarch, her legacy, or indeed the monarchy, these works primarily aim to address the passage of time and the fleetingness of human lives and endeavours. The timestamp is only as accurate as the clock in the camera, and it may be completely wrong.This is a time-specific series of five loop-pieces created, between the 8th and the 19th of September 2022, in response to the funeral pomp and communal outpouring of grief that followed the death of Queen Elizabeth II. If the file has been modified from its original state, some details such as the timestamp may not fully reflect those of the original file. This file contains additional information such as Exif metadata which may have been added by the digital camera, scanner, or software program used to create or digitize it.
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