Telling Stories With Sounds Workshop
Mentors: Frédéric Sanchez, Alice Litscher, Stéphane Wargnier | Group: Alena Ploski, Maya Agam
“A Relic of a Nightmare“ is a Sound & Video project that was created within a workshop at Institut Français de la Mode, we were tasked with choosing a historical fashion garment and tell a story around it using sound. Our group chose Jeckie Kennedy’s famous pink “Chanel” suit.
After conducting research about the suit and that day on November 22, 1963 when JFK was murdered sitting next to her in a convertible at a rally in Dallas, Texas.
One of the more interesting facts that we learned about that dress, is the fact that it is not an actual Chanel piece, but a replica “inspired” by the French house, an American made garment using Chanel materials. Jakie gained a lot of attention from the press for spending too much money on European fashion, so she started to buy American replicas during her stay at the white house.
Another point that we took into this work, was that the dress is preserved in the National Archives and will not be available for view until 2103. We imagined the sight of this garment: drenched in dried blood, frozen in time in a temperature controlled refrigerator and mixed that visual with the sight of Jackie holding a bouquet of red roses that someone in the crowd gave her when they arrived to Dallas.
Sound always came first in this workshop, we blended iconic songs of the time to set the atmosphere, with some of JFK favorites and created a narrative story of the “before” “during” and “after” of the event, with music smoothly intertwining between sound recordings of Jackie talking about her life and her marriage. After that, we created the video to go along with it. The video is a mix between archival footage of the Kennedy couple, along with commercials from the 60’s and footage of frozen roses that we shot in slow motion - melting, inspired by the visual of the suit frozen in the archives.
To accompany the presentation of the project, we also created an installation consisting of a rose frozen inside of an ice cube, with headphones coming out of the ice block, so the audience could catch Jackie’s voice whispering those sounds into their ear from a time frozen relic.
