Meanderings for WIP show next week. I will play an interview with two cleaners that I recorded last year. Preliminary ideas were to loop the interview on a small mobile speaker, attatched to some kind of cleaning equipment, and place the speaker in different locations around the university.
The directness of this installation set up felt mediocre to me. Positively it hacks the opportunity of the WIP show for a political campaign. Broadcasting the campaign. The loudness sat wrongly in my mind. I was thinking that we are so well adjusted to blocking noise and symbols around us. Using loudness and amplification for a political ending does not reflect my vision at the moment.
I’m imagining discretion, quietness and something requiring engagement. During a workshop with Rory, we put the speaker on the floor. I had the strong desire to do face the cone into the ground, an anthroporphic figure fallen, failing, giving up, and strangled by wires.
The potential of storytelling with the technology brought more questions to my installation. There is the audio file of the cleaners, but also the medium play the file.
I want to place a speaker on a stand, lying down, with a pillow beside the speaker. The audio recording of the interview will play quietly from the speaker. To engage with the work the audience must lie down on the pillow with the fallen speaker, to be close to the voice, to relax into it.
The title is “The Gift of Study”. The closeness of observation, the care of listening, the gift of studying. The positionality created by the installation encourages a moment of pause for another voice. The title suggests that listening is an offering, and that we study to listen. It may also suggest the space for studying is a gift. The cleanliness of this space is a gift from the cleaners.
There is a tension between the comfort of the pillow and the discomfort of social inequality discovered through listening. There may be an irony in the distance of study. The speaker is strangled, weighed down by its own position, yet the audience can roam free. The student chooses when to study.
This autonomy feels crucial to my current vision, to give a choice in interaction to not force a political campaign onto the audience, who may have a variety of ways they act and participate. Soft invitations, discrete sharing of knowledge, a refusal to amplify amidst loudness, in search of another way to solidarity.
Moten and Harney on study.
What if the students had no interests, no campaign, met needs in their surroundings beyond the thin wall of their learned logistics.
The cleaner’s strike requires a fuel of attention and care. This morning we carried out the first Breakfast Club, with students, cleaners and other staff. There was a pocket of peace created. Planning beyond action, but in making a momentary pause for eachother. Moments pass and we warm together, building trust. The simple yet profound meaning of gathering.