Mollspeak: Permanent installation work, Museum of the Home, London

Permanent installation work, Commissioned by Museum of the Home, London, June 2021

Mollspeak is an immersive sound installation by internationally renowned writer Maria Fusco in collaboration with composer Olivier Pasquet.

The experimental lyrical piece is voiced by Maxine Peake. It reveals the pains, desires and routines of 18th-century maid servants, drawing from extensive archival research and objects in the Museum's collections.

The work is an ever-changing composition of word and sound, highlighting the interchangeability of servants: you will never hear the same version twice.

Mollspeak, is an eighteenth-century phrase employers coined to mock their servants' dialectical speech.

This sound installation sets just such a servant's voice within an immersive experimental soundscape.

Maria Fusco's original script mingles new research with historic poetic form to give voice to a working class maid servant's story – reflecting on her duties, her desires and her place in the world – to create a plainly spoken, yet lyrical portrait.

The accompanying soundscape is created with 3D sound scans of these personal objects from the Museum's collection.

They include a tinder box, a teaspoon, a candlestick, a horn cup and a paper doll.

Maria Fusco is an award winning Belfast-born writer, working across fiction and performance writing. Her work is translated into 10 languages. She is currently Professor of Interdisciplinary Writing at the University of Dundee.

Olivier Pasquet is a French composer specialising in sound for performance.
Maxine Peake is an acclaimed English stage, radio, film and television actress.

The work was installed in the Undercroft by Christina Karpodini; a composer, media artist and singer based in London.