Liquid Architecture
where are you today
Through the month of August 2020, six men (Farhad Bandesh, Farhad Rahmati, Samad Abdul, Shamindan Kanapathi, Thanush Selvraj and Yasin Abdallah) produced daily ten-minute recordings from the hotels and detention centres in Port Moresby, Naarm and Meanjin where they’d been imprisoned after the closure of 'Manus Regional Processing Centre', which for years housed men who had once sought asylum in Australia by boat. These recordings were texted to subscribers, and also displayed each detainee’s distance from the recipient.
Sometimes, the men spoke to each other or directly addressed listeners. Sometimes, they said nothing. Sometimes they recorded themselves listening to music, news, birds. Six days a week, listeners were invited to spend ten minutes with the men (many from within their own encounters with a so-called 'lockdown', often casually compared to prison), to listen with or without expectation and to experience the implication of their proximity. This archive of the recordings will continue to expose your distance from their place of creation, within a broader predicament that remains unresolved and, for many, unending.
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Utopia is much easier to achieve when you stop worrying about it temporally. When it's just something you can kind of, like, reach out and grab for a second, except that, yeah, it needs to pass…watch for the next moment when you can grab it again.
In the wake of a COVID-cancelled exhibition, artist and organiser Bridget Chappell appeared in Liquid Architecture’s podcast to talk about their work, which explores sonic phase cancellation of police sirens and long-range acoustic devices (aka LRADs: acoustic weapons increasingly used in crowd control). They talk about what creating 'active silence' can mean in an activist context, and are candid about its utopian potential and significant risks and limitations.