Everything I Have Is Yours at Salford Museum and Art Gallery
Creative Tourist
Everything I Have Is Yours at Salford Museum and Art Gallery is a major new moving image and sound artwork exploring the first decade of the UK charts. Developed with and featuring Salford and Greater Manchester residents, who played in bands in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Working with a group of older musicians, described as the ‘original teenagers’ of the Manchester music scene, Everything I Have Is Yours, by Eileen Simpson and Ben White is an ambitious film and sound work which looks back to the first decade of the UK pop charts (1952-1962).
Simpson and White work across music, art and information networks. They have an ongoing commitment to safeguarding music that is in the public domain, by reusing and repurposing it. This new installation is part of their continuing project called Open Music Archive; an initiative to source, digitise and archive out-of-copyright sound recordings. Simpson and White work with a wide range of collaborators to freely share Open Music Archive material, to develop projects and to make new works of art. Everything I Have Is Yours is the latest of their projects that will enter the Open Music Archive.
A major new moving image and sound artwork exploring the first decade of the UK charts.
The film will focus on the group of musicians, now in their 70s and 80s, as they re-engage with top-ten recordings from the formative ‘birth of pop’ era. Working together, their interactions with these timeless sounds will be incorporated into new audio creations.
The sounds used in the project have been digitally processed for the project, to release out-of-copywrite samples, to enable collective use for the project and future sharing of the artwork.
As the group of musicians play, they interact collectively and individually with digital technology; recalling the sounds of the 1950s and early 1960s vinyl chart toppers, they will create new sounds inspired by the iconic archive. The process was filmed, the camera continuously tracking through the assembled musicians as the group spark sounds from the past, echoing the cyclical nature of the music itself. The result is an expressive temporal audiovisual dialogue, an intergenerational call and response, that cuts through the private, personal and public.
an expressive temporal audiovisual dialogue
Running alongside the artwork is Together We Move, a Greater Manchester engagement programme which offers an opportunity for older people to engage with the music, visual culture and social history of the era. There will be a showcase of their activities at Salford Museum and Art Gallery, during the exhibition of Everything I Have Is Yours, alongside a community-led programme of tours and events.
On Wednesday 10 July from 5.30pm–7.00pm, as part of Together We Move, a group of older musicians representing the film’s protagonists and wider Greater Manchester communities will perform at Manchester International Festival 2019’s Festival Square.
Everything I Have Is Yours has been commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, Contemporary Art Society, University of Salford Art Collection and Castlefield Gallery. An edition of the film will enter the University of Salford Art Collection.
