Haunting the Archive

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Walking piece details

Connected with

• Walking Event

  Drifting Bodies / Fluent Spaces – Lab2PT & Made of Walking (VII) – Guimaraes (Portugal)

  https://wlc.zone/1cy

  •

  · 22 - 24 Jul, 2020

When your work as an artist-researcher is about a response to place, how do you continue to conduct that research when you can’t physically be on site? This is a question that I have been forced to come up with answers to in the last few months. Since Spring 2019, I have been traveling to Ireland to live and work as artist-in-residence at Killruddery House & Gardens in Bray, as part of a practice-based PhD at SMARTlab University College Dublin, supported by the Irish Research Council. Staying at the house has been an integral part of a project to create a series of immersive 3D audio installations using geo-location in order to sonify some of the 400-year old written archives of an Anglo-Irish family, the Brabazons, who have lived and worked on the Killruddery estate since 1618. I have made hundreds of hours of recordings of informal conversations with the family, field recordings of the contemporary soundscape of house and surrounding landscape, plus recorded walks accompanied by my own spoken observations. This new recorded archive now takes on extra significance in providing a virtual experience of place, as I continue to research at a distance.

The audio paper, in the form of a binaural sound walk, was recorded locally here in Brighton over an area of Stanmer House & Gardens in the South Downs National Park which most closely approximates to an area surrounding Killruddery House & Gardens. Stanmer Park was a regular venue for my permitted daily exercise during lockdown. The paper explores whether one place can creatively stand in for another so that an artistic practice based upon walking, listening and learning can continue as a form of haunting, one that ultimately bridges physical and imagined space.

High quality download (wav, 960 MB): https://drive.google.com/file/d/116EEc6jYtG-jlDOfVRgZFxz-OTr4eL19/view?usp=sharing