The Backroom Community (sings for the shaken)

Monday, May 1 – Friday, May 5, 2017
Collective listening session: Friday, May 5 / 13:00

Halka Art Project
Caferağa Mah. Bademaltı Sok. No: 24/1
Kadıköy 34710 Istanbul

Brandon LaBelle in collaboration with Jeremy Woodruff and the Istanbul Technical University.

What type of acoustical force can be heard against and above a prevailing system of silencing and censorship? How might one shift the tones of domination, which work to capture the multiplicity of social becoming within its frequency?

The counter-tonalities of escape, and of refuge;
And the orchestration of alternative volumes;
Around which they and them may tune to other social constructs.

Based on an audio diary in which all sounds are recorded continuously over the course of five-days, the work takes shape as an amplification procedure: a room fitted with loudspeakers that play back the daily accumulation of audio. Including the input from a diversity of participants who record everything they do and everyone they meet, the work performs as an auditory assemblage of life lived.

As a sound system, the work aims to perform an interruption onto the invasive silences derived from principles of domination and that work to draw closed one’s lips, reducing the joyful expressivity of life and the erotic sharing of togetherness.