Reduce the Time Spend Holding New Museum, New York City, USA

Abstract

I am trying to find out about the complex ways in which the process of both inner listening and intimate listening to a soundscape of place impacts on the ability to understand one’s personal relationship to a city. How sound composition played in a different acoustic environment can impact on deciphering the visual.
For the contemporary art research output Reduce the Time Spend Holding I recorded the soundscapes of workshops and studios, as abstract liminal spaces between trauma and resolution. I asked Lubaina Himid to respond, having listened carefully to my composition of mechanical and human sounds of building and assembling. As a result of this experience possibilities opened up, allowing her to understand more about the potential of healing through making.

This process of inner listening, followed by the spoken response, both authoritative and intimate; also recorded in the workshops, was designed to take the audience towards understanding the multi-faceted fabric of the city.

The influences of practice around attentive listening, including the seminal work of Pauline Oliveros cannot be underestimated, but alongside this are other practitioners such as Christina Kubisch encouraging us to hear sounds in the city which are only audible through specialist equipment or Jordan Lacey listening to the architecture of urban space as sound but not noise and Susan Phillipz whose projects use the voice and how it projects within an acoustic space to influence the quality of that experience.

In a defined glazed space adjacent to the 4th floor gallery of the New Museum, I devised a setting in which the voice and found sound composition could be experienced as a standalone, yet intrinsically connected component of Himid’s exhibition. It asked audiences to re-imagine the visual and place themselves within the collaborative processes of the making space.
https://magda-stawarska-beavan.com/recent-projects/soundtracks-for-lubaina-himid/