Walking on Interstices: Tracing the Chora
During a residency and symposium at the London College of Communication I gave a talk on a soundwalk called Tracing the Chora, wthich was created by myself and Chris Weaver as a walk through the undeveloped areas surrounding a popular arts quarter in Dubai, UAE. The walk took listeners along the remarkable distinct interstices between a commercial development and part-industrial/ part-desert wasteland, where politically invisible cultures thrive ‘unsanctioned’. Areas of ‘unfixedness’ surrounded commercial locales in a state of perceived ‘fixity’, and the invisible became perceivable through sound. The walk was also a foray into layers of time, as an immersion in the present was layered with living memories of another reality in the same alleyways.
Plato’s Chora is a figurative place of unformed ideas, and is often characterised as feminine due to its potentiality and its position as a place of potential from which form originates. The interstices of a developed area show signs of care that remain unseen by certain classes. Being unnoticed they easily disappear in the face of development.
The Invisible Symposium
“This symposium seeks to reach in sound and words the invisible of sound.
It brings to a public forum ideas and works developed in a week of collaborative
working involving students from the Musrara School of Art and Society,
Jerusalem, and Bergen Academy of Art and Design, hosted by the Sound Arts
Course at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.”
Between sound works and talks The Invisible Symposium aims to discuss and perform the ideas of the invisible in politics, the everyday, in ecology and in creative practice. To see what sound reveals to us, and how it prompts a consideration of a possible, audible world.
Works by the students produced during the week, staff responses and their own research, as well as presentations and sound works by CRiSAP (Centre for Research in Sound Arts Practice) doctoral students, and especially invited guests, perform between practice and research, sound and language to propose what the invisible sounds like.