Sound Art / Street Life: Tracing the social and political effects of sound installations in London
(2016)
author(s): Christabel Stirling
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London (2013-14) to address the social and political effects of installation and place-based sound-works. I begin by reviewing a number of theoretical approaches to the city, using my own and others’ ethnographic accounts of London to problematize some of the affirmative conceptualizations of the city being propagated by non-representational theories and cultural geographers. In so doing, I provide the theoretical and contextual substratum for my ensuing discussion of the sound-works, and offer an initial view on why physical urban public space remains crucial to progressive politics. I then examine the sonic re-arrangement of public space in three site-specific sound installations. Through ethnographic analysis of the social dynamics summoned into being by each sound-work, and the “multiple mediations” that animated such dynamics (Born 2005), I offer interpretations as to whether, and if so how, the sound installations might be enlisted as part of a process oriented towards mobilizing democratic designs.
Ninguém entra duas vezes no mesmo rio.
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): rodrigo queirós
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
“Misfortune is the echo of hope”
By looking attentively we can renew our world constantly, everything that surrounds, even the most banal is a portrait of hope. In this Exposition I choose to focus on what is directly around me, in a nearly autobiographical form, at a same time forming a kind of portrait of a city and a memory of a disappearance. Paradoxically, the disasters of what is no longer with us, that has been lost, is also what we should maintain in "echo" as an act of tenderness. In an exercise of simplicity that arises from the question "what is the shipwrecked person left with?" of Hans Blumemberg.
Hustadt project
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Apolonija Polona Šušteršič
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In 2008 I received an invitation from the City of Bochum to make a conventional public art work in Hustadt, a suburban neighbourhood on the city’s south-east edge with an interesting beginning and turbulent recent history. Built in the late 1960s for approximately 6,000 inhabitants, the area was intended to be a Universitätsrahmenstadt – a residential area framing the campus of the Bochum University – built to offer professors, students, academics, and public employees nearby housing. As a result of various social, economic, and political developments related to today’s global situation, Hustadt has since then encountered many changes.
Today’s inhabitants of Hustadt reflect a microcosm of the world; approximately 56 different nationalities live in the neighbourhood, with many different cultures, lifestyles, and habits coexisting every day in close proximity to each other. High unemployment, lengthy integration processes, and the constantly changing community limit the possibility for its inhabitants to relate to the place as their home. As a result, Hustadt has the reputation of being a ghetto; its bad name has stigmatised the area.
Planned to last only nine months, the project turned into a three-year process of negotiations, discussions, and actions. It evolved into a self-organised initiative together with local activists (Aktionsteam) and provoked a huge discussion within the city legislature. The Hustadt Project was finally accepted in the urban regeneration plan for “Innere Hustadt” as part of “Stadtumbau West” – the Urban Regeneration Programme for Hustadt, Bochum. We managed to expand the initial budget for public art by 500% and turned a conventional public art commission into a sustainable participatory project.
More than an architectural object or urban infrastructure, the Hustadt Project was mainly a process composed of several parts. With Akstionsteam we researched the existing situation, through many formal and informal meetings, discussions, and workshops with people living in Hustadt and developed different activities for the neighbourhood in order to test the location, to encourage them to act on and react to present conditions, outside of official social institutions, to create a place by themselves and for themselves, using the results as arguments in political discussions. The entire process led to the drafting of a proposal for and the eventual realisation of the Community Pavilion – Brunnenplatz 1, a multifunctional infrastructure for the main square in Hustadt, a meeting place for inhabitants.
The Community Pavilion – Brunnenplatz 1 became a self-organised mini cultural institution that will continue in the future to work closely together with its inhabitants (Summer Film Festival – Hustadt 2012). The custodian for the Community Pavilion has become the UmQ e.V. – University meets Querenburg, Association for Street Culture, which will also care for the Pavilion in the future.
The Hustadt Project became a platform that stimulated the imagination about the future of the place and its inhabitants. The project focused on and addressed distributions of power in public space; the role of the artist/architect within urban regeneration projects; the issue of “spatial justice”; and the appropriation of public space.
“Misfortune is the echo of hope” By looking attentively we can renew our world constantly, everything that surrounds, even the most banal is a portrait of hope. In this Exposition I choose to focus on what is directly around me, in a nearly autobiographical form, at a same time forming a kind of portrait of a city and a memory of a disappearance. Paradoxically, the disasters of what is no longer with us, that has been lost, is also what we should maintain in "echo" as an act of tenderness. In an exercise of simplicity that arises from the question "what is the shipwrecked person left with?" of Hans Blumemberg.open exposition comments (0)