With The Living and Tender Flesh, Laura Khan Mitchison created a sound walk set in London’s Brompton Cemetery, and with this, she continues her collection of interventions connected to where the dead reside.
This work is one of the shortlisted pieces for the Sound Walk September Awards 2024.
Below, Laura reflects on her work.
This story begins before it begins with an email from a famous international artist, written in response to an oral history interview request.
Email Subject: (Canned response) UNAVAILABLE
Email Body: “It is possible that I was led into art because talking and being in the presence of another person were not requirements. I do not want to be asked my reasons for any of the art that got made. The reason being that there are no reasons in art. Everybody uses everybody else for their own purposes, and I’m happy to just be material for someone else as long as I can exercise my right to remain silent and immobile, preferably armed.”
It was instructive to see oral history “canned” in the same “tin” as journalism and art criticism by this email response. Oral history might be slower work. We might share authority, to varying degrees, with our narrators or interviewees, but we cannot deny our power.
“Silent and immobile.” I meditated on that artist’s email as I walked between “silent mansions of the dead”1 in Brompton Cemetery. Silence was fine, stiffness less so. We wanted to record oral histories with the living, creative beings who visit the cemetery, rather than documenting the dead.
Brompton is one of the “Magnificent Seven” garden cemeteries gifted to Londoners by the Victorian era. It runs from Earls court at the North Gate down to the Fulham Road in the south, bracing itself against Chelsea Football Stadium in the west. We wanted to hear from people who deeply understood the area’s history – art, counterculture, “the bootleg gender clinic”, Leather bars, community action, nature. Locals told us that their community assets had been served up on “a silver platter” to developers, as the land around the Cemetery increased in value. In this Soundwalk, you hear from people who have all resisted gentrification of the mind.
When we found these special narrators, we would often walk with them past golden catacombs and colonnades that curve like vertebrae around the Central Avenue. Just listening and observing. Camp cherub. Grand mausoleum. Cholera death. Russian millionaire. “Fell asleep.” “Died by mistake”. Pink convolvulus. Rustle of leaves. Firecracker ivy. Eternal Ouroboros (a snake swallowing his own tail). Fragments of symbol and story.
Then we would we sit down, usually in people’s homes, with the Cemetery’s mise-en-scène freshly in mind. Oral history takes time, and when we finally came to record, we invited reflection on the formative experiences from which a life is fashioned. I am haunted by voices; by all the struggles and adventures and hours of recording that we hold in our archives. We hope to return to these long-form interviews. For now, I feel that the time people spent with us gives the stories you do hear in this Soundwalk their resonance. These are extraordinary people taking a walk in a park; they animate an everyday practice.
Brompton’s wildness and wildlife shimmer in this piece. “Extraordinary energy” passes between the “magic garden” and the surrounding streets. You hear “people in flux”, “in all kinds of states,” on a sound bed of fanning bees, cocky crows and music. Through the curation of the sound walk, we tried to highlight the connections and acts of kindness between cemetery regulars.
I like the fact that one of the narrators addresses me by name, “I think you know your own inner voices, Laura.” This is a dialogue and I’m not excused from my part in it. So, my interjections are audible in this sound walk, because people’s voices and stories don’t come from nowhere.
A personal friend told me, “you sound too posh to ever get a gig at the BBC.” This made me laugh and wince. My voice is partly borrowed from a speech therapist who had wrestled her own voice from the larynx of another speech therapist, who in turn had “elocuted-the-hell-out-of” her Grantham accent. I swaddle my stammer with stolen vowels. Other narrators in this sound walk were born within the sound of Bow Bells or more distant places, but people might not guess it from their voices.
“The voice never simply appears, but is expressed, its shape formed out of resistance,” as the critic Steven Connor writes. Connor goes on to enumerate the anatomical strain of the diaphragm and intercostal muscles, but also the way the voice extends our reach, stretching towards things or repelling them.
These ideas about voices (and the reflections on power that I began with) make me think about the relationships that audio-makers create with our listeners.
Many of my favourite sound walk producers, from Janet Cardiff onward, invite their listeners to perform as if they were having a live encounter with an absent voice. A powerful move. The guide, in this scenario, gives directions for walking, relays information, and even sets a pace with the sound of her footsteps. Her pre-recorded voice might assume the role of friend or detective or protagonist. She gets inside you, the listener, entangling with your inner voice (or simply bamboozling you with directions). Mischa Myers describes this phenomenon as “the theatricality of sound in audio walks”.
By contrast, we want listeners discover Brompton Cemetery in their own ways; to make your own connections between sight and sound and space. The sound walk is prefaced by my off-the-cuff anecdote, without real authority. “One day, I was walking through Brompton Cemetery and I saw a single stiletto shoe beside a broken angel. It was as if the angel had been turned to stone just as she was about to fly off on a big night out.” I then invite you, the listener, to enter the cemetery via the North gate and drift south. After that point, I never address you directly; you only hear me in conversations with others.
All the voices in this piece have self-fashioned against expectations. It would, we reasoned, be quite perverse to dictate the listener’s path; we cannot predict where or how these stories will land. To rephrase an idea from one of the narrators in this sound walk, “How I hear the world and how you hear that I’m hearing the world is kind of sacred. I can’t really talk about that.”2
- “Silent mansions of the dead” is a phrase from a gravestone inscription, observed by the brilliant poet Jean Sprackland in another London cemetery. ↩︎
- The Cemetery has an excellent official website, providing information on visiting hours, wildlife species and notable graves. Brompton is grade I listed and a protected space. ↩︎
The winner and honourable mention of the SWS Awards 2024 will be announced around the start of 2025.
