Hidden Pieces: Citywide Gallery
‘Hidden Pieces’ explores the relationships between a city’s occupants and its day-to-day objects, and how this relationship can be changed and reframed through a disrupting agent. The work presents three “audio tours”, each relating to a common object in the urban landscape: a bench, a bus stop and a lamp post.Through fictitious narratives, the artist reveals these everyday items as artworks in a ‘Citywide Gallery’, each made in response to different social, political and philosophical concerns. The listener is instructed to stand in front of said object and play the respective object’s track on their phone’s loudspeaker. This action turns the listener into a main part of the piece, involving passers-by and creating an augmented reality of a museum that encompasses the whole urban setting. The stories transform and give new meaning to each object, while prompting an unravelling of the rest of our urban, including the authoritative voices heard within it. The piece was part of the Acts of Air online exhibition organised by the centre of Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) from the University of the Arts London.
This online exhibition, curated by Lisa Hall for CRiSAP Research center at University of the Arts London, brings together 14 relational artworks as a means to explore and interrogate our cities of sound.
Enacted or performed in any urban space around the world, this exhibition and participatory research project explores how the urban sonic is in the air - performed and enacted each day as we ride the buses, press the buttons and talk to one another, yet also limited and restricted by invisible rules of audibility. Each art work explores different facets of urban sonic living from gendered experience of public space to privatisation of resources or the articulation of sonic experiences that are outside of music and speech. Each artwork is shaped by the sites and locations that they were made in, which include Porto Alegre, Santiago, Manchester, Melbourne and Cairo, yet they can be enacted and activated anywhere around the globe investigated by a participatory audience who explore our shared and different conditions of urbanity. Hundreds of ‘traces’ of these perforative explorations can be found on the project instragram [@acts.of.air](https://www.instagram.com/acts.of.air/) The artists are: Agnes Paz, Anna Lann, Anna Raimondo, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Catherine Clover, Cédric Maridet, Colin Priest, Jacek Smolicki, Julieanna Preston, Kate Brown, Raheel Khan, Vagné, Vitório O. Azevedo and Yara Mekawei.
Conceived prior to the pandemic, the exhibition adapted and continued through the first wave of the global covid outbreak, coming to realisation in the early stages of the crisis, launching in summer 2020. Throughout 2020 and 2021 the exhibition was activated by workshops groups at arts festivals and Universities including Goldsmiths University (UK), Concordia University (CA) and Rewire Festival (NL). The project was also reviewed in [Sound Studies Journal](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20551940.2021.1879500) and [Cities and Health Journal](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23748834.2021.1897353?scroll=top&needAccess=true). The exhibition remains active and available for participation indefinitely, until its digital maintenance becomes untenable. In October 2021 Lisa led a celebratory symposium, [Sound, Art & Urban Spaces](https://crisap.org/research/projects/sound-art-and-urban-spaces/), online with CRiSAP director Cathy Lane, inviting five acclaimed researchers and curators of urban sound projects around the world to discuss the themes that drive their work and the changing considerations of urban sounding they've identified. Considered together their works offers a unique survey of urban sonic activity and highlights the multiplicity of relationships with sound in urban spaces. Guest speakers were Raquel Castro, Fernando Godoy, Hardi Kurda, Gascia Ouzounian and Carsten Seiffarth.