Following the bombing of the Manchester Arena in 2017, people of Manchester gathered tributes in an enormous spontaneous memorial, which was subsequently collected and stored by the Manchester Art Gallery. Now known as the ‘Manchester Together Archive’, this collection serves as a reference point for the way the city came together to mourn and to express their peaceful community solidarity against violence. I am working in collaboration with Kostas Arvanitis on an installation to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the tragedy in May 2022.
In the first iteration of this work, shared at the MANTIS Festival in Manchester in November 2021, I used sound samples of objects held in the archive, such as balloons and stones, and sampled the sounds associated with making other objects – drawing, writing, knitting, lighting candles. Best listened to on headphones to catch the mbisonic recording, in the original space I diffused the sound around 44 loudspeakers placed around the Cosmo Theatre at the University of Manchester.
A later iteration of the work can be heard here
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