JO BANNON & LAILA DIALLO
WOW Festival Istanbul Commissions
At the end of 2020, we were invited by the British Council to commission two artists based in Bristol to make a live performance for film to premiere as part of WOW (Women Of The World Festival) in Istanbul.
Here was an opportunity to actually make something. An invitation that for all of us felt both thrilling and daunting. We were working out of our comfort zones and full of practical caution, but driven by a giddiness to actually create some art that might connect to meaningful conversations around women’s rights.
Jo Bannon and Laila Diallo are both artists living in Bristol and making work here and beyond. We have worked with them and admired their practice for many years.
In considering who we might ask to respond to some of the themes threading through WOW’s programme – specifically around women’s relationship to civic space and to domesticity – Jo and Laila kept returning to the foreground as creators who we suspected would reflect on this in new and beautiful ways. With honesty and integrity. And they did.
We are delighted to now be able to share these pieces with you after their premiere as part of WOW earlier this year.
Enjoy.
Kitchen Alba – Jo Bannon
Kitchen Alba is a reimagining of the staged work, Alba, for a domestic kitchen.
Alba begins with two arrivals on the same day; a very pale child with a shock of white hair, and the Catholic Pope to the child’s hometown. One woman’s faith binds these two events inextricably and transforms a coincidence into a miracle.
Alba is about blending in and standing out, Influenced by the artist’s experience as a person with Albinism. It explores the stories we tell about ourselves and the stories told about us, the myths we inherit and the ones we embody, the identities we cannot shake off and so perform instead.
This new film version, Kitchen Alba, made in 2021 amidst a world ‘working from home’ places the miraculous in the most mundane of domestic spaces, blurring the border between the ordinary and the sublime.
Riffing on religious iconography, white goods, family, and faith, Kitchen Alba prompts us to look anew at our most ordinary and homely of spaces and to find meaning, miracle, and mystery wedged between the cookery books and the stack of dirty dishes.
Created by Jo Bannon
Produced by MAYK
Commissioned by British Council #WomenPowerInCulture for WOW Istanbul
Original stage work commissioned by In Between Time
Film-maker: John Stephenson
Cinematographer: Jack Offord
1:1 – Laila Diallo
I have been thinking about the movement of the everyday as it unfolds, out of view, inside the rows of Victorian terrace houses in the neighbourhood where I live. I have been wondering whether in other homes, like in ours, kitchen floors from time to time become dance floors, with everyday gestures sliding from the functional into something other, for the space of a song or two; dances danced between stove and table, big dances for our small rooms.
This is a dance made to the scale of our kitchen.
It knows the room well. It carries the repetition of its days. None really ever the same.
It remembers moments.
It holds some of the light, some of the weight, some of the landscape.
This is a dance made to the scale of our kitchen, tipping from the everyday into something else, carrying traces of dances danced before and inviting new ones.
Maybe this dance feels like a song.
I’d like that.
Created by Laila Diallo
Produced by MAYK
Commissioned by British Council #WomenPowerinCulture for WOW Istanbul
Cinematographer: Jack Offord
Sound Recordist: Laura Izzard
Additional Sound Recording: Laila Diallo