Matilde Silva Fry

Notes on Play

For ‘Notes on Play’, multi-disciplinary artist Shenece Oretha was commissioned to make a new work in response to the ‘Playtimes’ collection within the British Library’s Sound Archive – a rich variety of recordings documenting the imaginative, subversive and interpretative nature of play. The project is in partnership with the British Library’s ‘Unlocking Our Sound Heritage’ (UOSH) programme.

Using selected material from the sound archive as a starting point, ‘Notes on Play’ explores the politics of play, the creative capacities of active listening and the effects and meaning of the archival itself. The project offers an alternative means for a new or expanded audience to engage with the archive.

Through the act of listening to the collection our personal memories of childhood playtime can be conjured, which – beyond mere nostalgia – creates a sense of liveliness and palpability to our own, unique archive of imagination. Actively listening to the archive is also a means to critically re-examine it, to be attentive to who or what is missing. The lack of racial diversity in the digitised sound collection, despite existing in a national archive, reminds us of the urgency to address what archives do and who they are for. With this in mind, ‘Notes on Play’ aims to encourage listening – as a methodology and as an active practice – to be attentive not only towards what we can hear, but also towards what we cannot. Far from being static or passive, we understand the sound archive as a dynamic and active body that can be altered and reimagined, that can be a source for creativity – an artistic medium in itself that can be played with.

Curated by Mahamed Abdullahi, Maria Abramenko, Liza-Rose Burton, Rodrigo Chaveiro, Matilde Silva Fry, Kahyun Lee and Ruby Yang.

Matilde Silva Fry is a French and Colombian independent curator. Currently based in London and Brussels, she works in the field of curatorial activism and focuses on Colombian contemporary art.

Whilst at the RCA, Matilde has researched activist and socially engaged approaches to curating, exploring how the field of curating can be activated to be a useful ally to popular claims. During the first year of her MA, her research focused on outdoors exhibition-making as a form of activism. This investigation was crystalized in her essay entitled Should curators join the march? Curatorial activism or how and why to curate the streets in revolutionary times.

In her final dissertation An Exercise of Modesty: Studying utility as a methodology for social curating in Colombia, Matilde explored the concept of utility in the context of the curatorial. In alignment with the ideology behind the movement Arte Útil (Useful Art) launched by Tania Bruguera, she wondered what could be gained from assessing socially engaged curatorial initiatives in Colombia according to their usefulness.

For the Graduate Project and in partnership with the British Library, Matilde co-curated Notes on Play, an online commission of multi-disciplinary artist Shenece Oretha. Using selected material from the Sound Archive as a starting point, the project explored the politics of play, the creative capacities of active listening and the urgency to address what archives do and who they are for. For the public programme developed around the project, Matilde and Mahamed Abdullahi moderated a panel discussion with speakers Zarina Muhammad, Lola Olufemi and Roisin Tapponi.

Prior to the RCA, she obtained her degrees in Art History and English Literature from the Université Lumière Lyon II in France and from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She has worked as an intern at the centre for contemporary art FLORA ars+natura in Bogotá, Colombia, and has recently co-curated First Impressions, an exhibition in London showcasing the works of forty-one sculpture and painting students from the RCA. Moving between themes of repair, healing and ecology, the body and sexuality, this exhibition expanded on the potential for art objects to be vessels of emotion.

Shenece Oretha, Possibilities, 2021

This is a trailer of Shenece Oretha’s Possibilities which is a commissioned work for Notes on Play.

In Collaboration with:

Shenece Oretha

Shenece Oretha is a London-based multidisciplinary artist who explores the voice and sound’s mobilising potential. Through installation, performance, print, sculpture, sound, workshops and text she amplifies and celebrates listening and sound as an embodied and collective practice. Her work is attentive to not just the music, but the musicality of her experiences of Black oral traditions, ceremony, spiritual practice and literature, combined with the intimate emotional, physical, relational and communal resonance they generate.