Chorus

A film by ade on the occasion of the 2021 Architecture Film Summer School in collaboration with Future Architecture Platform and MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo.

In Chorus, fiction lends to architecture an alternative retelling. Taking as site a modernist Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church) set in the mountains of South Africa, the imagined narrative augments the otherworldly qualities of the structure and its landscape, abstracting it from historical specificity to offer new considerations. The film recalls how the voices that once belonged to the congregation became freed from the bodies that housed them, occupying the interior of the building with their song. Sound becomes synonym for spectre; the voice recast as ghost. Growing more ecstatic in their independence, disembodied femme voices lead the dissent, rising to the upper reaches of the spire. By their haunting, the sopranos reveal the hidden and suppressed alive within the space, resisting the ideologies that first shaped it. Architecture becomes score, offering aleatoric prompts sung by a local choir for the film’s soundscape. Radical in its invocations, Chorus reinterprets this structure of dominion with novel subtlety; the site becomes a resonating instrument with which to explore the condensed image of both the real and imagined.

Chorus is a film by Matty Roodt, Meghan Ho-Tong, and Lucienne Bestall. Sound by Likhona Camane with Vox Cape Town. Drone cinematography by Marcel Swanepoel. Produced by MAXXI with Future Architecture Platform on the occasion of the 2021 Architecture Film Summer School.

2021

Good News, Women in Architecture, a museum-wide exhibition curated by Pippo Ciorra, Elena Motisi, and Elena Tinacci at MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Art (Rome, Italy).

2022

SLOW DOWN! the 2022 Arquiteturas Film Festival (Porto, Portugal) organised by INSTITUTO, an international platform for discussing and disseminating architectural production through films, exhibitions, and debates.

2023

Travelling edition of MAXXI’s Good News, Women in Architecture at the Italian Cultural Institute (Stockholm, Sweden).

POV: Short Film Programme, screening hosted and curated by Northwest Film Forum for ByDesign: Architecture and Design Film Festival, as part of Seattle Design Festival (Seattle, USA).

Travelling edition of MAXXI’s Good News, Women in Architecture at Msheireb Museum (Doha, Qatar).

Travelling edition of MAXXI’s Good News, Women in Architecture at Piramide di Tirana (Tirana, Albania).

Travelling edition of MAXXI’s Good News, Women in Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Pristina (Pristina, Kosovo).

2024

Travelling edition of MAXXI’s Good News, Women in Architecture at Stir Gallery (New Dehli, India).

Travelling edition of MAXXI’s Good News, Women in Architecture at the Byzantine and Christian Museum (Athens, Greece).

Travelling edition of MAXXI’s Good News, Women in Architecture at the Italian Cultural Institute in Berlin (Berlin, Germany).