SOUND INSTALLATIONS
I love the counterpoint of voices and noises created by public spaces, and one of my passions is recording these voices and then re-arranging them into a story or soundscape that reflects their messiness as well as revealing a pattern underneath. I am especially interested in animating oral history archive by re-creating the counterpoints of voices narrating a particular event, or story, in such a way that the whole crowd of often contrasting experiences and witness accounts can co-exist in sound.
When was the last time you got lost? Sounds can be an unreliable guide. In August 2013, two travelers set out in search of Milan’s 14th-century Certosa (Charterhouse). But when they arrived at the train station bearing the same name, no one seemed to know where the Charterhouse was. It was nowhere to be seen. Or heard. Except for the faint sound of church bells, just audible above the swoosh of traffic…
This 9-minute piece is at once an audio-documentary—a love song to the pioneer radio documentaries of the 1950s, and a site-specific sound installation. With it, we bring the tangled sonic paths around the Certosa to Cambridge. Weaving together brief interviews, music, poems, and voice-over narration,Verso la Certosa evokes the dream-like state of losing your way in the twenty-first century Italian industrial periphery.
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Co-created with Gavin Williams.
Premiered at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas. 2016
