Celebrate 10 years of Maria Fusco’s Master Rock at SCAN Summit 2025
SCAN is delighted to announce that we have commissioned a deep listening event of Maria Fusco’s Master Rock, marking ten years of the seminal audio work in the fitting surroundings of Eden Court’s granite chapel. The event forms part of SCAN Summit 2025: The Grid at Eden Court on Tuesday 13 May – the first time that SCAN’s annual flagship symposium is being held in the Highlands.
Originally commissioned by Artangel and BBC Radio 4, Master Rock is an experimental drama recorded live inside Cruachan Power Station, almost a mile beneath a reservoir on one of West Scotland’s highest mountains, Ben Cruachan. Fusing the documentary and lyric, the work tells the epic story of the hollowing out of the mountain by Irish explosives experts known as the tunnel tigers, who blasted their way through granite rock to make an immense chamber for the power station.
Master Rock incorporates sound composed on site by Olivier Pasquet together with three distinctive voices: Irish actor Lalor Roddy as John Mulholland, one of the few surviving tunnel tigers; poet and philosopher Denise Riley as Elizabeth Falconer, an amateur artist who made a vast marquetry mural inside the turbine hall; and musician Ceylan Hay as the voice of the ancient granite.
Maria Fusco is a Belfast-born working class writer based in Scotland, Professor of Interdisciplinary Writing at the University of Dundee, and a nominated Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She writes fiction, critical and theoretical texts and edits publications. Recent works include History of the Present, co-directed with artist-filmmaker Margaret Salmon (2023) and Who does not envy with us are against us (2023) published by Broken Sleep Books.
Tickets are available now on a sliding scale – choose what you can afford to pay based on your own circumstances or choose to attend free of charge. This operates on a trust system and no evidence will be required on the day or at the point of booking.
This event follows the daytime SCAN Summit programme at Eden Court. Tickets for the Master Rock deep listening event should be booked separately to tickets for the daytime programme. For tickets to the main programme, please click here.