Chorus is a short film written, directed and produced by Meghan Ho-Tong, Lucienne Bestall and Matty Roodt for MAXXI Museum's exhibition 'Buone Nuove' as part of the 2021 Architecture Film Summer School. It was selected for the 2022 Arquiteturas Film Festival Porto.
In Chorus, fiction lends to architecture an alternative retelling. Taking as site a modernist Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church) in South Africa, the imagined narrative augments the otherworldly qualities of the structure and its landscape, abstracting it from historical specificity to offer new considerations. It recalls how the many voices of a congregation became autonomous from the bodies that housed them, occupying the building with their song. Sound becomes synonym for spectre; the voice recast as ghost. Ecstatic femme voices lead the dissent, accumulating in the upper reaches of the spire. By their haunting, the sopranos make apparent the hidden and disavowed alive within the space, resisting the ideologies that shaped it.
Architecture becomes a resonating instrument through which to investigate and contest gendered power relationships alive in our built world.
Produced by: MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo
Written, Directed & Produced by: Meghan Ho-Tong, Lucienne Bestall and Matty Roodt
Cinematography & Editing by: Matty Roodt
Sound Design by: Likhona Camane
Choir: VOX Cape Town
Drone Cinematography: Marcel Swanepoel