Icebergs
Message from Sophie Harris:
Hello everyone,
I wanted to share a bit about the background to this short film - Icebergs. I am a cellist and music has been a profound enabler in my life. As a young child when there was no space for my voice or visibility, music lifted me like a magic carpet, offering story telling, connection to other people and the possibility of transforming despair and sharing the sheer joy of life through the language of sound and its abstractions.
Music has led me to take courage into my own hands, providing a key - excuse the pun!- to unlock other haptic worlds of making with hands, what you might call “thinking hands” - writing poetry, improvising in my cello, knitting, drawing, and circumnavigating the sometimes crippling demands of the intellect.
Icebergs: What you are about to hear is a cello improvisation which I made in response to meditating on the melting world. Subsequently, I annotated the piece for a group of cellists to play at a cello festival in Holland, where I was giving some recitals. The festival organiser’s real job was at GreenPeace and he asked if this music could be used to promote their work. My very young children were with me at the festival and there was no time to engage with this idea - as any of you with young ones will understand!
Just before this year’s festival ( where I live in London ) I was working on David Attenborough’s last film Oceans, and struck up a conversation with the director - you have probably seen his work with David Attenborough on Netflix over the last few years. I have asked if he might help to complete my frozen narrative for GreenPeace, maybe this will be its future after all, but for now the series of images which you are about to see is my first exploration of a visual conduit for the visceral soundscape of Icebergs.
As the world descends into neo liberalism and the rest… it is the artists and makers who are jettisoned early on as being surplus to requirements. I would like to offer that all creative acts give us the opportunity to imagine a different outcome, connecting us to a sense of awe and to our commonality. And so, in the spirit of creative activism I will leave you with a word from the great James Baldwin
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Sophie x