Three women in the art collective Dumpstar collaborate on creating their first musical single and music video inspired by the reclamation of insidious experiences. Dumpstar: The Good Prevails (2022), is a documentary notebook of my attempt at reconciling puzzle pieces of media, trauma and melodies into some kind of meaningful memoir. The song, ‘Under Oath’ for all intents and purposes is a vignette dedicated to the tumults of being seduced, trapped and freed from a toxic relationship by any means necessary.
Dumpstar draws on Riot Grrrl philosophy, a women-based punk movement born in the 1990s that focused on spreading feminist politics through DIY cultural production such as music, zines, performance, and visual art. (Siegfried, K, 2016, p.2) This film weaves narratives of the personal and political through music and video, a pretty packaged culturally-based “populist feminism” (Lankford, RD 2010 p.8) Promoting creativity and production to explore issues revolving around relationships, identity, gender and female sexuality.
A live performance scores a vampiric coven as they turn their new victim. This documentary exists as both a participatory and performative transmedia text, a kind of production diary. (Nichols, 2017, p.109) Composed of archival footage, illustration, animation, and fantasy; the film serves as a ceremonial reconstruction of female angst and love through lyrical incantations. The music video is amusingly camp, constructing an imaginary world – where art, music, fashion and cinema meet, “art is always more than art, more than the meeting of specific means of organising speech, sounds, colours, volumes and movements. It is an idea of what art does.” (Rancière, 2015, p.106) The set, is the studio, the stage, the street, our little house on the south coast filled with singing and screaming laughing.
Dumpstar: The Good Prevails (2022) is a cinematic container holding space for the weight of emotion, and creative production, deconstructing the notion of plastic pop records with a DIY approach to creation. Embracing a poetic mode, the film tenderly documents female friendship through an instinctive, melodic, yet assertive gaze. Cut together as a bricolage, mixed media representation of our experiences generating sonic and artistic rituals and rites.
The stylisation of the film is influenced by experimental video artist Pipilotti Rist. The quick cuts, colour grading, animations and collage sequences inspire themes of the surreal and intimate. Emotions of jubilant excess, humour, and comic violence are on display against the mournful and impassioned musical score. Rist once wrote, and I agree that she wanted her video work to be like women’s handbags, with “room in them for everything: painting, technology, language, music, lousy flowing pictures, poetry, commotion, premonitions of death, sex, and friendliness.” (Tomkins, 2020)
Dumpstar: The Good Prevails offers an immersive and immeasurable collection of memories and emotions that you can see live well beyond the screen.
Written, directed, edited and produced by Merlin Parody
Starring:
Merlin Casey
Celeste Reid
Matilda Merrick
All music written and produced by Dumpstar
Vocals/ keys: Merlin
Guitar: Celeste
Bass/keys: Matilda
References:
Lankford, RD 2010, Women singer-songwriters in rock a populist rebellion in the 1990s, Scarecrow Press, Lanham, MD.
Rancière, J, 2015, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes. In Dissensus on Politics and Aesthetics, edited and translated by Steven Corcoran, 123– 41. London: Bloomsbury Academics
Siegfried, K, 2016, Affective Cultural Practice: Imagining Queer Feminism in the Riot Grrrl Movement, Syracuse University, pp 1-94
Tomkins, C., 2020. The Colorful Worlds of Pipilotti Rist. [online] The New Yorker. Available at: [Accessed 5 June 2022].
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