SPECULATIVE SONIC FICTIONS AND URBAN ABSTRACTIONS

An investigation of the materiality of space and spaces, rhythms, ghosts and the otherwise unseen presences of the urban landscape. No space is ever truly empty, each has a story to tell. Through deep listening and feeling, I choose spaces that speak. Recording these spaces and working with these recordings electronically and aesthetically, I allow the material - the materiality of the space itself - to lead. 

MERCADO MODELO

2020

This sound work is based on recordings made in the empty basement of the Mercado Modelo in Salvador, Brazil. First opened in 1912, the Mercado Modelo faces the Bay of Todos os Santos in the historical centre of Salvador. Now housing mainly vendors of clothing and curios for tourists, it was once a customs building for goods coming in via sea freight.

In the late twentieth century, fire destroyed the building and exposed the long-forgotten basement. When the building was reconstructed, the basement was opened to tourists, but later closed again due to flooding. The basement is below sea level and often floods, making it unpredictable, although there are concrete slabs for walking through the space.

There are many stories about what might have happened in that basement, now called a senzala (slave quarters). A popular story is that people who were to be sold as slaves would be ‘housed’ there on arrival in the Western world. It is said that regular flooding caused countless people to drown. Some historians reject this possibility completely.

What does one feel entering such a space? Spaces and places speak, but how can we decode the language? Listening with the entire body, I felt an overwhelming sense of presence at the Mercado Modelo. Was that presence real? Was I influenced by the stories I had heard about the space? Was it metaphysical? Or purely physical—low frequency vibrations from the movement of the surrounding sea?

To record the sound of an ‘empty’ space is never to record ‘nothing’, but rather to record the subtle vibrations of the limits of that space: a conspiring of the walls, the ceiling, the stagnant pools of water collected throughout, the air moving. The space vibrates with the memories of things that have happened there—good, bad, indifferent. And what are memories but versions of fact, stories about the real? Digitally analysing the recordings to extract and amplify normally inaudible resonant frequencies, I piece together an alternate reading of the space through its sonic materiality.

The recordings were made while on residency at Vila Sul, Goethe Institut Bahia in Salvador in 2020. The work was realised for the project Are You For Real? by IFA Germany and curated by Paula Nascimento, Yvette Mutumba and Julia Grosse.

SONIC REMAPPINGS OF THE CONGO RIVER (KINSHASA AND BRAZZAVILLE)

2019 - ONGOING

With support from Pro Helvetia (Swiss Arts Council) Johannesburg, I traveled to Kinshasa and Brazzaville to record sounds of both urban areas, with a particular focus on areas adjacent to the river. News reports in 2019 stated that funds had been secured to construct a bridge connecting the two cities, placing them, and the areas around the river in particular, in a state of suspended transition. The recordings act as a document of a moment in time and place, as well as raw material to be tranformed into a new, speculative, fictional place or set of networked places. More to come.

RHYTHMIC DECONSTRUCTIONS OF DELHI

Audio 2016

Using a combination of techniques for extracting and analysing rhythms of recordings of the urban soundscape of Delhi, along side several sampling and sound manipulation techniques, I created a series of sonic sketches that represent alternate readings of the cacophony that is Delhi. These were broadcast over short range FM to radios dispersed on the rooftop of Khoj International Artists Association at the end of the Coriolis Effect residency in 2016.

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STORAGE 1896-2015 

Audio (4:00) 2015

The Constitution Hill precinct is located at 11 Kotze Street in Braamfontein, Johannesburg near the western end of the suburb of Hillbrow. The original prison was built to house white male prisoners in 1892. The Old Fort was built around this prison by Paul Kruger from 1896 to 1899.

Built into the northern wall of the fort are a series of rooms, concrete on all sides. The doors, no longer on their hinges, are stacked in the furthest room. They are thick steel doors with small sliding openings. Hooks hang from bars close to the ceiling in each room. 

A long corridor leads to isolated rooms, mirrored below by identical rooms accessed via heavy wooden trap door in the floor. There is a tunnel that leads from these rooms to the city morgue and the Hillbrow Police Station. 

The official story is that these rooms were used for file storage during Apartheid.

Storage is comprised of recordings of these empty rooms, resonant frequencies amplified in an attempt to call out from the dark empty spaces a felt presence. 

A stereo version of this piece appeared in the Leonardo Music Journal No.25 (2015).


Pictured below: 8 channel installation version in collaboration with Noluthando Lobese-Moropa.

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