Re-Sounding Place and Space

These are samples of sound projects I have worked on over the past few years.

The Teeming Silence of Condemned Social Housing

This is a crafted recording (embedded below) of my visits and explorations of the now demolished Heygate Estate in South London, part of my contribution to an ongoing project to create a vast sound-map of London. I used the vilified walkways of the estate, to record the resounding absence of residents who had been 'decanted' to make room for urban re-development.

My recording practice was one of playful meandering, gleaning sounds along the route that were inevitably filtered through my subjective inclinations and attentiveness as a listener. The resulting piece is layered in a way meant to reflect the fragmentary experience of walking along obstructed paths, climbing over rubble, or stopping to listen as church sounds blended with bird song. It is meant as an acoustic record of a space that speaks back to official discourses about marginalized, criminalized urban space and seamless, positive regeneration processes.

A Walk Through London's East End

The East End is home to places like the recently refurbished Ocean Estate in Stepney, known for many years as one of Europe’s largest and most deprived housing developments. It is also home to vibrant Brick Lane and Whitechapel Road, the East London Mosque and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. 
Imran Jamal, an ethnographer at the School of Oriental and African Studies, has worked in the East End’s Bangladeshi community for many years. He gave an unorthodox tour of the area in November 2012, which I recorded together with Thalia Gigerenzer for MIT's CoLab Radio. The audio track is embedded below.