High up in the former Observatory buildings on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, in the imposing City Dome that once held a substantial telescope for the use of the city’s amateur star gazers, the sound of alien music is ringing out.
Or at least, alien for those who recognise the base chords in Cauleen Smith’s 2014 work H-E-L-L-O as those of the extraterrestrial visitors in Steven Spielberg’s epic sci-fi film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Already emotive, those chords take on new significance in this evocative work from the American artist, here with her first solo showing in Scotland, a piece filmed in New Orleans some nine years after the devastation and loss of life and home of Hurricane Katrina (2005).
“Smith has taken those five notes from that iconic score and reinterpreted them,” says guest curator at Collective, Emmie McCluskey.
Filmed in places of historic importance for the communities that live and lived there – whether that is Congo Square where enslaved Africans would meet and make music on their ‘free’ Sundays or St Augustine Parish…
