Sound art and the making of public space

Abstract

This paper draws on a collaborative sound art project that aimed to explore how sound art as a non-representational method might attract and produce new publics and re-signify iconic public spaces. We describe how the project, AGORA, proceeded and to what extent it transformed the spaces it was performed in and made new, if transient, publics in the moments of performance. This paper focuses on the British Museum and St George's Church, Bloomsbury. In the Museum the contemplation and resignification provoked by the intervention enlivened the sacred character of the museum. We argue that this (re)sacralization can be experienced as a practice of decolonization, albeit perhaps limited to the space and time of the performance. The Church, already signified as a sacred space, provoked another kind of encounter with the sacred and the colonial. The extended period of reflection provoked by the performance made visible the etchings of colonialism in the fabric of the building. Our contribution is primarily to the geographic literature on non-representational theory in relation to sonic geographies and music geographies. This paper points to the potential of sound art to make us listen to spaces more attentively.

Sonic colonialities: Listening, dispossession, and the (re)making of Anglo‐European nature

“…As George Revill notes, there has been limited work in geography looking at how ‘particular characteristics of sonic phenomena engage with particular spatial dynamics’ (2016, p. 242). Sound installation, argue Karen Wells and Ain Bailey, ‘demand reflection of the sentient listener and in doing so enable us to apprehend artefacts and buildings in new ways of knowing’ (2020, p. 1087). Including sound installation here is crucial to understanding how sonic coloniality makes space and place.…”

“…The material properties of acoustic geographies, including natural acoustic arenas, or what Blesser and Salter term ‘aural architectures’ (2007, p. 2), give rise to different ways sounds are experienced, which have social meanings and influence emotional and psychological and physical states. If, as Wells and Bailey emphasise, sound compositions can help to understand ‘how people engage with their environments, and with the histories inscribed in place’ (2020, p. 1088), then it is necessary to include the contexts these events emerge from and into. To think through sonic colonialities in terms of place‐making, more unfolding of Watson's work is needed, particularly in framing overlay as displacement.…”