My queer lioness: the artist unleashing a gender-bending cat on Venice
Turner prize-winner Charlotte Prodger is representing Scotland at the Biennale – with gargling bagpipes and a butch lioness with a beard. She reveals all about her wild attraction
It is entirely characteristic of Charlotte Prodger’s gentle, subtle wit that she has used the sound of bagpipes in her new film, which is Scotland’s official offering for this year’s Venice Biennale. It is equally characteristic that she is completely uninterested in using a recognisable melody, preferring the low drone instead. “It is a means to an end,” she says. “Players need the drone for air to pass through the instrument in order to play notes. So I asked the player not to produce any notes. Then she happened to do this thing they call a pressure drop, which is where the instrument ‘gargles’, and which they are taught not to do. And I said, ‘Oh, please can you do some more of those?’”
Her film, SaF05, is full of moments when the eye or ear is drawn to something – such as the bagpipe pressure drop – that would normally be regarded as an error and discarded. One shot shows us the grubby smudges on Prodger’s laptop screen; others linger lovingly over the great sculptural mounds resembling “ghosts or shrouded human figures” that rise above termites’ nests – images captured when she was actually trying to shoot something quite different.