Something
that tries to escape, as a continual departure,
to
loosen the seams, but also which seeks to find connection, to be
heard.
Sound
as an unsteady economy of the between. In this way, sound teaches me
how not to be myself.
Brandon
LaBelle 1
1.
Outdoors,
late afternoon. Street vendors, cars up and down, families shopping
and kids yelling. Urban life in action on a friday afternoon,
apparently random and intimately organized. Let's say that I propose
you to stand next to the man who sells jeans and to pick one of the
characters in this imaginary scene. Do you have it? Who is it the
mother of three or the book seller or the teenager with a bike?
Let's
sit in the café round the corner. You'll be staring at the wall and
I will ask you to describe for me what this character might be doing.
I'm sure your blind guessing will be right. Because you have seen
this street thousands of times, you know how to walk in it, where to
buy cigarretes by unit and whose eyes you should avoid. This
conforms to a rough and ready balance where whoever is in control of
the portion of space becomes the rightful arbitre of what weaker
others get to hear or see2
I
have left you alone sitting in the imaginary café staring at the
wall and the guys in the tables around start muttering jokes about
how weird you look, two girls pass by the table and comment on your
clothes and the waiter asks you about the woman who has just left
without warning. You might have thought that you were alone, but you
weren't. Out in the street, late in the afternoon you are accompanied
by a crowd of others who know who you are not. And have an opinion
about who you should be.
2.
Mashroua,
morning. Pop-up message in the phone: I'm sorry for the last time, I
left you waiting in a fictional café. Do you have any plan this
afternoon? Let's meet at the tram station for a walk. You are a bit
late but it's fine, arriving a bit late is a way of breathing. I
didn't tell you, but we won't be alone.
Close
your eyes. Let's walk. Someone will hold your hand and you will walk
the sound. At first you will be worried about whose hand are you
touching, the texture of the skin, the strenght of the wrist, the
touch of the elbow against your arm. Then you will notice the smell
of this other someone walking with you. Is it parfume or deodorant?
Is it the scent of a he or a she? And then you will stumble on some
obstacle at your feet. And the someone will hold your hand a bit
harder and you will consider opening your eyes and put and end to
this game.
But
you hear the clinging sound of a bell, a horse charriot maybe or a
juice seller. The body who guides you slows down and you are a bit
dizzy because you don't know what's around you and you can't predict
what could happen. But the
challenge for this exercise is that no matter how slow you are
walking, you can always go much slower3.
The
air is cold and accelerates as a harsh loud sound passes by your left
side. You don't move because a stanger is holding your hand and is
not giving you any sign to go forward. After a while the stanger will
touch the palm of your hand and you will resume the walk, and some
voices will approach you and you will hear them wondering wether you
are blind or stoned. You cannot see the stranger but you can tell
that he or she is smiling just like you are now. Because you share a
secret, you are listening to the shapped air between you and I and
the city and these voices are just a detail of its sound.
3.
Tramway
station. Afternoon. A voice whispers in your ear “you can open your
eyes now”.
It
will not be me that you will find standing next to you. Your
intuition was right, someone you don't really know has been finding
noises for you. Together you have composed a space built with spare
pieces of wind and horns and men's voices and rushed steps and
humming leaves and smell of smoke.
Your
eyelids feel heavy and your lungs are open, the breathing has found
its way to participate in this partition and now it's your turn to
pick the sound you want to share, knowing that sound
is ungovernable, that is, it is at one and the same moment, yours and
not yours4.
I
will close my eyes and I will stand in the street. Someone, maybe
you, will hold my hand and we will draw the streets again. The
feeling is somehow subversive because we are inventing the shape of a
space we thought we knew. It
is sound itself, as pathetic trigger, that entices us to inhabit this
world in listening, and grants us access to what the world might be5.
This
afternoon we are out in the street alongside with few strangers
walking slowly exposing our vulnerable bodies to the urban rush,
daydreaming, soundwalking. Experiencing a
way of being related to what is not me and not fully masterable (…)
a kind of relationship that belongs to that ambiguous region in which
receptivity and responsiveness are not clearly separable from one
another
6
4.
In
bed. Late night. Your inner voice tries to identify the streets we
have been walking in today and you don't know how to link the bell
with the horse or the voice with the face or the smoke with the café.
And when you are about to fall asleep, your body reaches the weight
of the dream and tells you that it is not important, because your
ears and the stranger's hands have drawn a map of possibilities in a
city where the impossible is narrowing by the day.
Together
we have questioned that terrible weight of the official reality that
says: there is what there is. And so we could breathe. The macro
situation remains the same, but now we see it from another place.
It's all horrible, but at the same time we have proven ourselves
capable of producing another reality. And that automatically
generates joy, a new emotional climate7.
Tomorrow
I will pass by the imaginary café. I will be a bit late and you will
be sitting alone with a glass of tea. Your
eyes will be closed, your head slighly bent, a minor smile in the
corner of your lips, your ears wide open. The
guys in the tables around will be muttering jokes about how weird you
look and two girls will pass by the table and comment on your
clothes. They won't know it, but they will be witnessing the
disappearing act, your vanishing self in the sounds
of Alexandria.
I
will sit next to you and whisper: you
can open your eyes now.
*
Notes based on the workshop “Experiencing a sensitive exploration
of the city” with the art collective City sounds concert /
Ici-Même, organized by Nassim el-Raqs in Alexandria between the 6
and 15 of november 2015.
** This article was orginally published in arabic in the cultural magazine Tar al Bahr.
1
LABELLE, Brandon. “Lecture on an acoustics of sharing” in
FISCHER, Berit and MUHLEN, Kevin. Hlysan,
the notion and politics of listening.
Luxembourg. Casino Luxembourg, 2014. p. 22
2
DARWISH, Hany quoted by EL-WARDANY, Haytham and MAAMOUN, Naha: “How
to Disappear” in The
right to silence
conference curated by ABU HAMMDAN, Lawrence. Amsterdam, 20-23 march,
2014.
3
OLIVEROS, Pauline. Deep
listening: A composer's sound practice.
Lincoln: Deep Listening Publications, 2005. p. 20
4
RAIMONDO, Anna. “Brandon LaBelle, interviewed by Anna Raimondo”in
Reflections
on process in sound (2).
p. 2-12: December 2013.
5
FISCHER, Berit. “On the notion and politics of listening” in
FISCHER, Berit and MUHLEN, Kevin. Hlysan,
the notion and politics of listening.
Luxembourg. Casino Luxembourg, 2014. p. 15
6
BUTLER, Judith. “Rethinking
vulnerability and resistance”
conference
in the XV
Simposio de la Asociación Internacional de Filósofas. Madrid.
Instituto
Franklin - Universdad de Alcalá de Henares, June 2014. p. 16
7
FERNÁNDEZ-SAVATER, Amador. “How
to organize a climate"
in Making
worlds: a commons coalition: 9
January 2012
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