/LOCAL/SENSES//CHURCHYARD/////, polyvocal videography, 2023/24.
These short digital videos are two of eight (one above, one below) made in response to LOCAL SENSES’ participation in Liberty Festival 2022, Deptford, London. The work develops the group’s multi-sensory approach to mapping local environments as a polyvocal listening practice performed through the use of subtitles as a diagram of the exchange.
Each video focuses on the words deployed by the group as they respond to a particular environment or activity beyond the visual. This focus does not seek to make a narrative of this process but rather to hold open the moment of encounter between the group and the environment. As a result, many subtitles appear on screen at once making a conventional reading difficult to achieve. This encourages instead a type of reading that is more like listening, and a type of listening more attuned to the plurality of voices at play. The video also includes the voice of the speech-to-text translation service employed to generate the subtitles (rendered in green), complicating the embodied environment with the environment of translation and reproduction.
For Liberty Festival, LOCAL SENSES shared their poems, music and meditations with both attendees of the festival and local residents. More information on LOCAL SENSES COLLECTIVE can be accessed here:
/LOCAL/SENSES//SAMOSAS////////, polyvocal videography, 2023/24