Listening memories

Sound artist Hannah Kemp-Welch has collaborated with Southampton-based dance and movement artist Gabriel Galvez and the John Hansard Gallery, to lead a series of workshops with elderly people in and around Southampton exploring the relationship between sound, memory and gesture. The project is called Listening Memories.

Workshops for Listening Memories were conducted over three days in Eastleigh, Chandler’s Ford and Freemantle. Hannah captured recordings of the workshops’ stories triggered by sound, and edited them into an audio collage, which premiered at a ‘listening cinema’ at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton city centre.

“My collaboration with Gabriel was instigated by the John Hansard Gallery,” explained Hannah. “Gabriel has worked with groups of over 60s for several years in Southampton, running movement classes such as ‘Dance for Parkinson’s’ in local community centres. The groups bring together people in the community who are at risk of social isolation and with few resources – they are an important event in the week for participants to feel part of the social world and take part in an activity with both physical and mental health benefits.”

Hannah is a sound artist with a social practice, making the Listening Memories project an ideal fit. She produces audio works in community settings, and her works often discuss social issues, and involve the people most affected as project collaborators – gathering and sharing testimony and organising activist responses.

She said: “The basis for my engagement with these groups was to offer a new stimulus for the class. I invited participants into the garden outside the venue in which their movement classes take place and suggested a method for listening – first to sounds nearby such as body, clothes and breath, then to sounds far away like traffic, planes, and wind in the leaves. This short meditation evoked discussion about our soundscape, and our ears’ magic ability to tune between sounds. Participants agreed they mostly don’t notice their everyday soundscape.

“We then all wore headphones and listened at the same location, connected to highquality field recorders. We discussed the difference between what we heard previously and the new amplified version. We discussed the flattening effect of the recorder and new sounds noticed through the change in amplitude.”

Hannah further explained the workshops: “From the gardens, we moved inside. We then spoke about sounds we noticed in particular, and then Gabriel led the group in an activity to create gestures that represent these sounds. These gestures were mirrored by the group and gradually became larger, more performative and dance-like.

“Following this, we spoke about sounds that we particularly remember from the past. Participants volunteered these eagerly and the tone changed to one of reminiscence. The sound of knitting needles, the arcades at the seaside, a voice, a bomb shelter. We made gestures to respond to some of these sonic memories too.”

Following the workshops, participants were invited to the John Hansard Gallery to a ‘listening cinema’. For this Hannah curated 10 artists’ works with strong sonic elements, which all had birdsong as a central theme. Everyone listened to these works together and discussed them.

“Participants said that they found the works very interesting and enjoyed the diverse ways artists approached the same theme,” said Hannah. “We also played a game of ‘bird bingo’, a game I constructed which involved a simple bingo board with the names of common British birds. I played short samples of these bird calls and participants crossed them off the board if they thought they recognised which bird made the call.”

Liza Sylvestre, asweetsea, installation view, John Hansard Gallery, 2022. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Reece Straw

Lynne Dick, Head of Programme, Engagement and Learning at the John Hansard Gallery, added: “We believe in creating space for meaningful engagement for people of different ages and abilities.

“I had the pleasure of joining in one of Hannah’s sound sessions in Freemantle, which I found extraordinary. Hannah has a thoughtful approach to working and introduced new ways of listening so that we could understand how we hear and how our brains filter sounds. Gabriel’s involvement was key because he was receptive and open to this collaboration. It was lovely to welcome the group to the gallery to experience the collated version of their recording and a series of sound works by other artists, carefully selected by Hannah. Being a part of this sharing experience was very rewarding and I could sense that the group felt at ease.”

Hannah’s audio collage was launched on the John Hansard Gallery website in November 2022, where it will feature alongside a creative transcript by the Care-fuffle working group.

Find out more: sound-art-hannah.com/ listening-memories

VOICES IN THE GALLERY

Listening Memories is part of Voices in the Gallery: a research project about how voice, text and access intersect in contemporary art.

Led by Dr Sarah Hayden, Associate Professor in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Southampton, the project is funded by two AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Innovation Leadership Fellowships (2019-2021, 2021-23).

The first phase of Voices in the Gallery considered voiceover as a phenomenon that exists simultaneously as art-form, literary genre, and sonic intervention in gallery space.

As part of this work, Sarah curated the exhibition, Many voices, all of them loved, featuring work by artists Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, Laure Prouvost, Kader Attia, Willem de Rooij, Liza Sylvestre and Lawrence Abu Hamdan at the John Hansard Gallery in spring 2020, and guest-curated a strand of for Queer Art Projects’ #WIP: an exhibition themed around process and work-in-progress.

The second phase of Voices in the Gallery is now underway and encompasses ongoing collaborations with Nottingham Contemporary (Caption-Conscious Ecology), Wysing Arts Centre (A Language of Holes) and LUX (slow emergency siren, ongoing).

For the current phase, Sarah has curated Liza Sylvestre’s asweetsea at the John Hansard Gallery.

This will be the Liza’s first solo exhibition outside of the United States and features newly-commissioned video, sculptures, drawings and (captioned) audio tours.

As an artist who is deaf, and whose child and partner are both hearing, Liza tries to locate where her disability lives within their family. Hannah’s Listening Memories workshops were devised to engage the exhibition themes.

In asweetsea, Liza investigates how we make, share and access meaning together. It runs until 14 January 2023.

Find out more: www.voicesinthegallery.com