What We Talk About When We Talk About Work, a programme of talks taking place at northern art institutions over the past year, invited prominent artists and curators from the region along with invited European guests to discuss emerging themes and ideas within contemporary art. The final talk in the series, Sound & Listening brought together Artist/Curator Sam Belifante, Artist Jez Riley French and Curator Kalliopi Tsipni-Kolaza to present their recent sound projects before taking part in a panel discussion.
Pauline Oliveros, whose avant-garde experiments were influential on the development of sound art, described how she was overwhelmed with fear watching JFK’s assassination and the Vietnam war unfolding on TV in the early 60s. She began experimenting with producing long omming sounds, focusing on a single note for a long period of time in an attempt to comfort herself. These early experiments developed into the basis for her theory of ‘Deep Listening’, a group listening practice in which listening is a form of activism. Oliveros believed that through the process of Deep Listening “New fields of thought can be opened, and the individual may be expanded and find opportunity to connect in new ways to communities of interest. Practice enhances openness.”
Jez Riley French produces beautiful, rippling recordings of architectural elements, often in places that hold a strong personal resonance. For him listening is a personal, bodily experience, and in the talk, he draws a strong distinction between active listening and mediation. However, by making inaudible sounds, such as the vibrations of a lightbulb or the humming of a gallery floor, audible, he gives us a heightened awareness of the world around us. Oliveros would argue that active listening is mediation. These field recordings, and the process of listening to them, makes us feel more connected to the world, which is where the political potential of sound lies.
Belifante conjects that “you are always trying to locate a sound”. Sound has a strong relationship to space and place, as it involves the listener trying to psychically locate sound in relation to their body. The way artists use places and spaces in their work has developed from ‘site’ referring to a physical location to being understood as a set of historical, social and political relations, allowing artists to work in a fluid way when dealing with locations as a subject matter for work. Perhaps by thinking about sound in this context, we can open a new territory of relations, allowing us to explore complex political, historical and social contexts through sound.
In her 2016 project for Forecast festival for HKW in Berlin, Sonic Revolutions: Vibrations from the Levant, Kalliopi Tsipni-Kolaza explored the relationship between political activism and underground music in the Middle East. She uses an example of the BO18 nightclub in Beirut, which was built on the site of a former concentration camp for Palestinians, to make the link between war and underground music concrete. She exhibited film works by Basma Alsharif which included field recordings from the Gaza Strip alongside a live sound performance by Joe Namy, which was originally intended for The Garden of Forgiveness in Beirut. Listening to these sounds in Berlin, the audience would have experienced a sort of bi-location, being transported to another place through the process of listening. Issues as complex as the ongoing conflict in the middle east are reduced to an encounter with a sound, a human interaction in which listening becomes a place of both discomfort and empathy.
From Luigio Russolo’s fascist noise machines to John Cage’s keen interest in anarchism, the origins of sonic art practices are inextricably linked to the political contexts of their times. If some of the early developments of sound art were a response to the political upheaval of the 1960s, it is fitting that the political possibilities of sound are re-emerging now. Referencing Nietzsche during the talk, Belifante says “You can’t close your ears”. Perhaps if we stop thinking of listening and looking as being somewhat at odds, we might be able to work with the sonic in visual art in a freer way, utilising it as an accessible medium to explore complex political, historical and environmental contexts.
