Swimming Home

Swimming Home is a private meditation that takes place in your bathroom. Developed through interviews with swimmers from all over the UK, you will be immersed in an aquatic and sonic world. The ordinary becomes fantastic, your home becomes a film set and the bathtub or shower turns into a deep swimming pool at the bottom of which we sit quietly. You travel through an underwater reality all the way to the bottom of a pool, where time is suspended. The piece is experienced following an audio track which guides the participants through a series of actions to be performed in their own bath. The track uses 3D sounds, binaural and underwater recordings, in order to recreate and amplify the sense of being in the swimming pool, taking you all the way to the bottom (where sound is quick and thick) and back to break the surface. Narrating voices belong to Silvia Mercuriali, Sam Booth and Simon Kane and to the swimmers’ interviewed by the artist during the R&D process. Multiple voices mixed in with a combination of ambient sound music and bits of filmic dialogues, transporting us, in and out of the pool, allowing the audience to superimpose imagined realities onto that which they watch. Despite the confines of a bathtub, participants travel through an underwater reality all the way to the bottom of a pool, where time is suspended, and then back to break the surface. The piece ends just as the next act starts: by the edge of the pool about to jump in.

Narrating voices belong to Silvia Mercuriali, Sam Booth and Simon Kane and to the swimmers’ interviewed by the artist during the R&D process.