After a much needed break in May, Gallery Bagging’s co-editor Eliza brought in a whopper of an exercise for June’s [synonym] session #4.
Beginning with our journey towards the POC-run Listen Gallery on Hunter Street, Glasgow, we followed Tennant’s chimneys towards this quaint little building sporting a rectangular encapsulated graffiti tag hovered by this session’s exhibition focus title Listening for Love by artists Cindy Islam and Kyalo Searle-Mbullo. Islam is a Sufi sound and performance artist and in this exhibition she has transformed Room 1 into a safe and serene space where water flows from a PVC tube into a domestic ceramic sink decorated like a stone garden next to a lantern that voices Luna Issa, an Iraqi-Scot who speaks on her experience of cultural and communal loss. Searle-Mbullo is a musician and audio-visual artist whose work inhabited Room 2 with projections of light accompanied by barely-distinguishable audio.
As always, we initially encourage the writers to navigate the space highlighting elements or themes that to them are pronounced and sensual – the objects and sounds that activate the senses. After that, Riah, the one running the show at the Listen Gallery, took the time to chat with us and the writers about the gallery and the exhibition answering questions regarding the curatorial intentions highlighting crucial insights as well as happy accidents. We encourage those to seek their own heritages – in language, translation (or not) and share those stories that remind you of your own heritage and personal histories. As artist Cindy Islam and Kyalo Searle-Mbullu have done with conversation, sound and with language using Swahili, Kikuyu and English the work explores personal and collective histories as time unfolds. ‘Listening becomes the only route to self-discovery.’
With eyes, ears and minds full Eliza guided us out of the gallery over to the nearby hill known as the Necropolis. Here is where Eliza revealed her intentions to the group of several thought-bending adaptation of exercises extracted from Viv Corringham’s Soniferous Spaces featured in ‘Walking From Scores’ edited by Elena Biserna.
I’ll list them below and will whole-heartedly encourage you to try these exercises out, if you can.
- Open your ears. Resolve not to speak. Let your gaze be soft. Walk.
- Find 3 different surfaces to touch.
- Listen to your own existence. Can you hear yourself walk or breathe? Notice whenever you can’t hear yourself.
- Listen for the quietest sound right now. What is it?
- Can you hear 5 different sounds right now?
- Stand for a moment. How do you feel about those sounds?
- What is the best sound you have ever heard?
- Can you remember a sound from your childhood? Can you play it to yourself like a memory?
- As you leave, remember one sound. Take it with you. After this, go home and listen to it again in your memory.
It was an exciting tactic to get one enraptured in being absorbed by oneself, no longer was I living in the present; I was instead travelling through my past. Memories brought to life with audio remnants that were hard to retrieve but once done so truly enchanting. I haven’t stopped thinking of mine since.
After the activity we gathered together in a circle, sitting on the grass amongst the carved stone (we’re still at the Necropolis on top of the hill) and shared our experiences. One of the things we treasure about the session and the group we have amassed is that we delve into deep topics and offer open ears as well as open hearts – listening for love still ebbed in us, even if we were half a mile away.
And then we wrote.
[synonym] session #4 writings
Joelle Miller Composing Garlands
Three bent fingers
made visible through
woven tufts
make no sound in pink satin.
Three bent angles
made visible through
filtered waves
make no sound in neon white.
Harmonic forms
coil
loop
arrange
a triadic ballet.
They speak a language
you have not yet
learned
of cross-fades
and acoustic flux;
of arrivals and
delays;
of voice and shadows;
of love and loving.
You stick a defiant finger
in each ear,
composing the echo.
Brooke Hailey Untitled
Bubbling water and fluid reflections,
Where memory dances in the ripples.
Here, in the soft capsules of sound,
An expansive site of archival exploration,
What does it mean to listen?
To hear histories, memories.
Sound and memory, language and identity,
Spiritual practices of listening,
Voices traversing spatial time,
Home is not just a place, but a feeling
Alasdair (Ally) Watson Sound
When we hear the sound of the city,
It’s maistly the sound of cars,
And I resent that,
Yet I cannot sleep withoot it.
The motorway gouges through the city,
And thrums like a deep distant river;
A saft, fuzzy blanket rolling ower me,
As I lay in the night, like a bairn
Driftin awa in the back of the car;
Swaddled, safe, sound.
A-J Reynolds Listening to memories
lying down
my head on a pillow
safe and warm
Lights scan my bedroom’s folds
cutting the plaster edges
The soft doppler effect
placing me in the back seat
We’re going home after a night with familials
Home is across the waters
the red bridge parallel to the one
we cross, our line
of connection
The red rhombus rail bridge’s
mechanical worm whirs across;
merged orange windows
mirror the orange epidermis that drapes
over my eyes.
Droplets of rain,
blurry;
The metal beams of light
pass, blurring;
1 – 2, 1 – 2, 1 – 2.
We are hosting [synonym] sessions writing events each month and have announced our fifth instalment taking place at the Glasgow Women’s Library, date 20th July 2024.
All are welcome, we aim for this workshop to be casual and we aim for this group to give space for all voices, expertise and experiences and very much encourage people who wish to also develop their writing, however, previous art writing is not essential.
For more information and tickets to our next [synonym] session click here.
We’d also like to thank Riah, the curator at Listen Gallery, for all of their help. Genuinely fantastic person and a brilliant gallery, be sure to support this grassroot treasure.
Gal bag. 