Fari Bradley and Hannah Kemp-Walsh are students and members of the CRiSAP research faculty, dedicated in sound studies and sound arts. Bradley’s currently studies the relationship of of drawing or sketching with sound and performance. Creating a set of performances that where sketched by an associate artist, with the purpose of visually mapping the sonic elements of the performances and outlook another perspective of the performance. Her inclusion of drawing and sketches in the performances led her to also experiment with visuals scores, including them in her most recent work. Bradley’s work is influenced through her background in classical musical notation, but as contemporary sound researchers and practitioners, she intends to drive her sketches and visual score far from the norms of classical notation.Her work has led her to perform and exhibit in academic institutions in the middle east and south east Asia. As she spent long periods of time in those countries, she found great inspiration in the physical structures she found her self in. Drawing sketches inspired in markets and architecture of Karachi, and then finding a way to translate it to sound.
In 2014 she created a piece/sound exhibition called ‘Variations for Rooms and Tone’ presented in Karachi, where she combined static drones with vocalist mirroring the frequencies in a room of a gallery. The performers where allowed to move through the room, creating different relationships between the tones and the drone, affected directly by the acoustic of the room. The visual aspect of the piece was of great importance to the composition, the audience in the gallery had to be static opposite from the performers but they had a clear sight of the movement of the performers. Bradley was interested in finding out if the fact that the audience could see the movement of the performers, affected the outcome or expression of the exhibition.
As visual media and literature are important factors in Bradley’s pieces, she has included phrases and quotes in the background of the exhibition. The words in the back helped the audience to connect tones with images and communicate desired messages. This messages mostly communicated feminist and social justice ideals. A recurring phrase in her work was ‘Women take back the noise’, a quite minimalistic and abstract quote that manages to stick with the audience, forcing them to seek their own interpretation.
Hannah Kemp-Walsh the other half of the visiting practitioner lecture, works with mediums such as radio and its relationship with listening techniques. Her PHD is practice based meaning that her work involves activity and events instead of the more scholar job of writing and archiving. With collectives such as Shortwave and Soundcamp, she has created festivals and workshops where she teaches listening and sound technology. These workshops have a lense in promoting feminist activity within this practices, trying to diversify this fields that are male dominated. One of her most recurring workshops is teaching people how to build DIY radios, and then with the tool find ways to create sonic art.
Her experience with workshops and collectives led her to create ‘The Right to Record’ a project dedicated to help marginated communities regarding physical disabilities, to find social justice through sound practice. The project focused in different legal processes that disabled people have to face to get government aid. This processes are full of corruption, finding multiple ways to avoid helping this communities in need. When individuals tried to apply for this grants, they where forced to conduct written interviews and test to categorise their level of disability. These interviews where corrupted by officials, writing false information on the official applications, preventing people to get the aid they need. ‘The Right to Record’ movement as its name suggest was allowing people to record these interviews to prevent corruption from happening, using sound as hard evidence. The project consisted of multiple zines and sound works that where directly projected to the corrupt organisations, this pieces had declarations from the victims of the corruption and their impact from it, mirror by sound and music to highlight the emotional expression.
The following is the link for the zine: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54fefbf2e4b034b7a7fd0a7f/t/61dc5726e6b18849f484eb84/1641830198635/PIP+ASSESSMENTS-2+%281%29.pdf
I found Kemp-Walsh approach for social justice quite inspiring. This is the first time I come across a sound practitioner using mediums such as zines too manifest a project and a social change. The structure of the project and the layout of the scene create a very strong arguments towards demonstrating government failure. Sound in this case is used to mirror the information of the zine, giving it a more emotive force. Even-though of this, the art aspect of the project does not dilute the truth and evidence of the situation. Making the project both aesthetically heavy and argumentatively accurate.