SOUND((ING))S

Abstract

SOUND((ING))S takes place at sea. It constitutes part of an ongoing poetic sequence, the first sections of which were text-based: Collecting Shells (2011), The Sea Quells (2013) and CONT. (2015). The latter was performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London as part of Poetry and Sound on 5 February 2016. This section will be played as a sound-based installation on board a chartered vessel as it crosses the English Channel, sailing between Dover and Calais with provisions for refugees based near the French port.Human crisis at sea demands a poetic practice that is prepared to go to sea as a form of research and witness. This installation ‘maps’ two means of crossing one border: by sea, across the Channel and underneath the seabed, through the Channel Tunnel. It invites a process of ‘reading’ that is informed by the scientific process of echo sounding, or ‘sounding the depths’, which is used to measure depth in liquid and to recover bodies lost at sea. Layered auditory patterns and increasingly heavy rhymes simulate traditional sounding methods, whereby weights were lowered down piano wires. Listeners can ‘dredge’ for submerged—and suppressed—content relating to the killing of migrants by neglect across Europe through programmes like Frontex’s Operation Triton in the Mediterranean Sea in 2014, which replaced search and rescue procedures with a mission ‘to control borders and not to rescue at sea’. The installation’s bilingual wordplay destabilises two languages used to deny migrants movement across the English-French border.The work offers the recovery and re-appropriation of sounds from and about the human body—the female body in patriarchal language, the disabled body in an age of austerity and welfare cuts and the asylum-seeking body within the EU. Drawing on a secondary meaning of the phrase ‘to take soundings’, which is ‘to canvas opinion’, the installation includes a petition calling on the UK government to provide legal, safe passage for a greater number of refugees.