New Sound and Film Installation opens at Cardiff Royal Infirmary

The Arts for Health and Wellbeing Team are delighted to launch ‘HOSPES’, an immersive, site-specific installation and online portal created by award-winning composer & multimedia artist John Meirion Rea, in collaboration with cinematographer and photographer, Huw Talfryn Walters.

HOSPES

Latin
Noun Hospes m (genitive hospitis); third declension
1. Host
2. guest, visitor

The installation will be sited on the first floor of the renovated Capel I Bawb at Cardiff Royal Infirmary, above the Aroma café, in the wonderfully re-designed original chapel.

HOSPES is part of the Cardiff Royal Infirmary: People, Place, Future project, funded by the Arts Council of Wales through the Arts, Health and Wellbeing Lottery fund, and has been a year in the making. The stunning sound composition and installation celebrates the strong voices of our unique multi-cultural communities, and the online portal provides a digital legacy for this ground-breaking arts project.

“HOSPES is an immersive, site-specific installation and online portal, which places The Cardiff Royal Infirmary in its historical and social context. I have spent the past eleven months reaching out into the surrounding streets and boroughs, recording conversations, abstract soundscapes, and capturing images in an attempt to define, or at least search for a sense of what modern ‘urban Welshness’ might be.

Much of my creative work is inspired by the voices of the people of Wales; my fascination has been on the melodic nature, and the textures of language and dialect and how this helps us learn something about our shared history, and the collective present.

The History of Tredegarville, Splott, and Adamsdown can be traced in its architecture: specifically in the change of its usage and function, whether falling into disuse, or being demolished completely and replaced with the new. But if we look more closely at this transformation, a picture emerges of change in the population, and the communities that live, and have lived here. This is particularly true of the Infirmary, and its previous incarnations as a Dispensary in this part of the City. Together, they represent a two-hundred-year history, and the origins of Cardiff as a City, forged in the Industrial Revolution and beginning with a meeting, chaired by the 2nd Marquess of Bute in Cardiff Town Hall, in 1822. So, this fascinating contrast of permanence and transience, both in the ‘hard ambience’ of the buildings themselves and their transformation in usage, also the ever evolving ‘soft ambiences’ of diasporic languages, dialects and soundworlds.“ -John Meirion Rea

The Arts for Health and Wellbeing team invite you to visit ‘HOSPES’:

First Floor
Capel I Bawb
Aroma Café
Cardiff Royal Infirmary
Glossop Road Entrance
Cardiff
CF24 OJT

Tuesday 18th October 10-4pm

Wednesday 19th October 10-4pm

Thursday 20th October 10-7pm

Friday 21st October 10-4pm

Saturday 22nd October 10-2pm

Monday 24th October 10-4pm

Tuesday 25th October 10-2pm

Cardiff Royal Infirmary is an iconic Cardiff landmark building steeped in healthcare history and heritage. Formally an inpatient and nurses training hospital, the ‘CRI’ is now the first of Cardiff and Vale UHB’s Wellbeing Centres, providing services for some of the most marginalised and vulnerable people within our communities alongside regular healthcare services. As we redefine our services for the future, we look to provide accessible and equitable quality of care to all, and to tell the unique, fascinating stories of the people within our communities.

We are deeply grateful to John Meirion Rea and his team for creating this wonderful artwork and digital legacy.