Excerpts x 2 from Eyewitness Blues

2 excerpts from my radio script Eyewitness Blues which was produced by the BBC as part of their The View From Here project.

Fifty-something jazz musician, Jac, and 15-year-old schoolgirl, Gia Nghi, both witness a botched robbery at an outer suburban 7-Eleven. Their statements to the police however, reveal more about themselves than the crime.

Excerpt 1:

JAC
The loan that built the house for me and the ex, wasn’t big enough to buy the paint or plant the garden, so I took a second job. For extra money. To put down roots.
Pig Face, Acacias, Native Fuchsias. Not that you’d know that to look at it now. Wind-blown rubbish and dandelion clocks, more like.
But nothing took, no water-wise plants, no family, no tree.
And she’d say: I never see you these days.
And I’d say: It’s only temporary. Til we get on our feet.
And then she was gone, along with the kids, leaving me alone with the desert and the Camels …

Excerpt 2:

GIA NGHI
Sometimes, the wind off the desert makes it hard to swallow.
Over there’s where you get the bus to the city, and that way—nothing. Few kilometres north, the land crumbles to desert. It used to be under the sea or a lake or something. Before it dried up and went salty.
Sometimes, at night, I imagine the extinct animals in a sort of reverse Noah’s ark. Leaving 2 by 2, through a door in the back of the world.
Or the camel on the cigarette packet walking off in search of water.
Ghosts have trouble with water, my Gran says. I reckon Australia must be ghost paradise then. Because it’s so dry.

The View From There

In the second half of last year I worked on an international project called The View From Here. My contribution is a 12-minute radio script called Eyewitness Blues, and I'll probably put a short excerpt from it on this blog post its BBC broadcast. This is an edited version of information on the project website.

The View From Here is a collaboration between London’s Slade School of Fine Art, the Bartlett School of Architecture and the BBC. It explores notions of cultural translation and trans-positioning by artists working in different media, drawing from the 3 key project terms: transmit, translate, transmute.

For Transmit 4 visual artists, from Australia, China, Israel and Uganda, each filmed a 12-minute video in a locale connected to their work, under the title The View From Here. These works were then sent to a writer in the artist's country to author a radio drama inspired by it. These 12-minute dramas have been recorded for broadcast on the BBC World Service on 28 February 2009 in the final stage of the project. The artists are: Barbara Bolt (Australia), Xioapeng Huang (China), Shuli Nachshon (Israel), and Daudi Karungi (Uganda). The writers are: Noëlle Janaczewska (Australia), Dinos Chapman & Simon Wu (Hong Kong/UK), Katie Hims (Israel/UK) and Charles Mulekwa (Uganda).

Translate: Eleven PhD students from the Slade and Bartlett made a series of works, in response to either those 4 works or the theme. The works will further inspire other students, invited to the event as respondents, to reshape, translate, transpose the original works through a text/image/audio/performance piece of their own.

Transmute is a combination of a BBC Broadcast and a Live Event on the 27 February. This final event will combine the broadcast, the original films and the resulting re-interpretations.

It's all happening at the Slade Research Centre, Woburn Square, London WC1.