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Summary
2021 Old dear in the headlamps (an erroneous presentation) This two channel video installation was created as part of Ecologies of Displacement an international residency funded through The British Council and Creative Scotland, which took place in Scotland and Pakistan. The video was shown in two, two person exhibitions – along with works from my collaborator artist Farrukh Addnan – at Koel Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan (January 2022) and Summerhall Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (August 2022).
Old dear in the headlamps (an erroneous presentation) was directed by Michele Marcoux. Performed by Michele Marcoux and Drew Burgess, with sound recording (Spain) by Francisco Llovera. Filmed and edited by Sana Bilgrami. Shot on location in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The videos should be played simultaneously and allowed to loop.
Description
Poised in the light, stunned by it? Crossing the landscape, emerging from it? The voice of my son is in my mouth and we sing a song from far away.
An epidemic of Nostalgia?
The word nostalgia comes from two Greek roots [nostos ‘return home’ + algos ‘pain’], yet it did not originate in ancient Greece. The word was coined by the ambitious Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in his medical dissertation in 1688. Contrary to our intuition, nostalgia came from medicine, not from poetry or politics. Among the first victims of the newly diagnosed disease were various displaced people of the seventeenth century, freedom-loving students from the Republic of Berne studying in Basel, domestic help and servants working in France and Germany and Swiss soldiers fighting abroad. Nostalgia was said to produce “erroneous representations” that caused the afflicted to lose touch with the present…The patients acquired “a lifeless and haggard countenance,” and “indifference towards everything,” confusing past and present, real and imaginary events…Dr Albert von Haller wrote: “One of the earliest symptoms is the sensation of hearing the voice of a person that one loves in the voice of another with whom one is conversing, or to see one’s family again in dreams… It comes as no surprise that Hofer’s felicitous baptism of the new disease both helped to identify the existing condition and enhanced the epidemic, making it a widespread European phenomenon.
– from The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym,
The Cowboy’s Lament
The song sung in this piece, The Cowboy’s Lament (also The Streets of Laredo), is a famous American cowboy ballad derived from a folk broadside (or broadsheet) song of the late 18th century called The Unfortunate Rake. One of the most common forms of printed material in Scotland, Ireland, England and North America, a broadside was a single sheet of inexpensive paper printed on one side, often with a ballad, rhyme or news.
The Cowboy’s Lament has been recorded many times, most memorably by the actor, folk singer and activist Burl Ives. It is this version that I listened to with my children when they were young.
Lyrics to The Cowboy’s Lament:
As I walked out in the streets of Laredo
As I walked out in Laredo one day
I spied a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen
Wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay
I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy
These words he did say as I boldly walked by
Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story
I’m shot in the breast and I know I must die
It was once in the saddle I used to go dashing
Once in the saddle I used to go gay
First down to Rosie’s and then to the card house
Got shot in the breast and I’m dying today
Get sixteen gamblers to carry my coffin
Get six jolly cowboys to sing me a song
Take me to the graveyard and lay the sod o’er me
For I’m a young cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong
Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin
Get six pretty maidens to sing me a song
Take me to the valley and lay the sod o’er me
For I’m a young cowboy, I know I’ve done wrong
Oh beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly
Play the Dead March as they carry me along
Put bunches of roses all over my coffin
Put roses to deaden the clods as they fall
As I walked out in the streets of Laredo
As I walked out in Laredo one day
I spied a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen
Wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay
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