Lacunae is part of A Silent War, a COVID-19-response poetry project written by Ross Thompson during the first lockdown. Drawing on the poem’s imagery of an abandoned Louvre and a disappearing Mona Lisa, this film explores the devastating impact of the pandemic on cultural institutions. Independently, sound designer and composer, Georgios Varoustos had been making recordings throughout the lockdown period, and when Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive invited him to create a soundtrack for the work, these eerily changed soundscapes formed the basis of his response to Ross Thompson’s poem. 

The film shows ghostly archive footage projected on the closed curtains of cinema screens, and in deserted galleries. Dancers pirouetted around empty staircases, and AIDS quilts are endlessly folded in. At the point where the work was being created, there was a sense of uncertainty around which spaces would reopen when, or if, the pandemic finally came to an end, and how those that survived would rebuild in the post-COVID world. The film simultaneously points to the richness and vulnerability within shared cultural experiences.

Lacunae by Ross Thompson, written in Bangor during 2020 Lockdown

1. 
In the abandoned Louvre that afternoon, 
we gazed upon the rectangular space 
where the Mona Lisa once hung before 

she amscrayed, was volée, was replaced 
by a transparent frame of bulletproof 
glass entirely empty save for a few 

sachets of silica gel, a slab 
of climate-controlled nothingness 
housing a phantom portrait: a blank 

canvas rendered in vanishing 
paint made up of brushstrokes so fine 
they were negligible, points so small 

they were invisible, disappeared 
one feature at a time, headdress first, 
then her pearls, next her eyelashes 

and brows, then her enigmatic smile, 
each part erased as if doused in pungent 
turpentine. A masterpiece of absence. 

2. 
An hour later, in the museum café, 
we ate substanceless croissants 
and drank sugar-free lemonade, 

neither of us breaking the dead air 
until someone closed the tills, switched off the lights 
and let us disappear into the dark. 

Poet: Ross Thompson

Reader: Linda McKenna

Audio Mastering (Original reading): ST Mastering

Sound design: Georgios Varoutsos

Original music composed by Georgios Varoutsos

• Ross Thompson Bandcamp
• Laura O'Connor website
• Georgios Varoutsos