5x5x5 Audio Works

Dr Zoë James is Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Plymouth, UK. Her key research interests lie in examining hate from a critical perspective with a particular focus on the harms experienced by Gypsies, Travellers and Roma. Zoë’s research has explored how mobility, accommodation, policing and planning have impacted on the lived experience of Gypsies, Travellers and Roma. She has presented her work nationally and internationally and is Co-Director of the International Network for Hate Studies.

In this podcast Dr Zoë James explores the way that Gypsies and Travellers have been kept apart from wider society via myths about their identities and cultures that rarely conform to their lived realities. Through the use of quotes from empirical research, the voices of Gypsies and Travellers are heard that evidence their social, economic and political exclusion. Romantic notions of nomadism and racialised perceptions of Gypsy and Traveller legitimacy underpin the harms of exclusion they experience in their daily lives.

Anna recently graduated with a First Class Honours in History with English from the University of Plymouth. Her background is museums and heritage, with a focus on the themes of decolonisation and contested history. Anna’s dissertation, entitled ‘From imperialism to repatriation: the Royal Cornwall Museum as a case study in changing responses to indigenous artefacts in collections’, explored the museum’s collection of Māori taiahas (indigenous New Zealanders wooden spears) and discussed decolonisation and repatriation, comparing the Cornish case with three other museums in the South West. In 2020, she was awarded an IGNITE Micro-Internships, University of Plymouth, becoming a Digital History intern under the supervision of Professor Daniel Maudlin of Cornerstone Heritage. In this role, she has been researching and writing about contested heritage and the statues debate, with a focus on local history.

Working from a personal perspective, Anna’s podcast opens up some of the complexities around the statues and public memorialisation debate in Britain. Protests following the tragic death of George Floyd, an African-American who was killed under US police custody, created a wave of global protests steered by the Black Lives Matter movement. In the UK this re-sparked and triggered local, regional and national protests. The podcast focuses on the toppling of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol, and the contested heritage in Plymouth, UK, with the renaming of Sir John Hawkins Square, the first English slave trader.

Andy Cluer is a visual artist based in the South West, UK, working predominantly with sculpture and sound. His sonic work investigates place, both real and imagined, through the mapping of memory, sound and perceptual experience. Andy’s work often questions the relationship between auditory and visual awareness, exploring different ways of listening and how sound can be experienced through non audio mediums and similarly how images can be invoked by sound.

Drift | Hum is a body of audio works which investigates our immediate environments through the relationship between human and nature in our new, unfamiliar landscapes found during the 2020 global pandemic. By exhibiting sounds and words, the artwork focuses on how sound perception, through listening, can invoke visual perception as a way of interpreting subtle changes in our environment.

Through the quietness, intimacy and the return of undisturbed nature, undamaged by human activity in lockdown; to the reappearance of human sounds, the droning of mechanical machineries concealing the emergence of wildlife with the easing of restrictions; and the tensions and anxieties of the long term effects of human habits – these audio works are used to create an auditory visual awareness of the environment and conduct a deeper attentiveness of our relationship with the world.

The arrangement of Hum was composed through Foley sounds and human vocals and continues the reoccurring theme of the relationship between human and nature introduced in Drift. The act of touch and feel against the surfaces of a single sculptural sound object was performed to compose the Foley sounds – resulting in a droning soundscape. The vocals were used to recreate a human interpretation of this soundscape and engage a conversation between person and nature, reflecting on the sounds and our experiences of the everyday. The vocals on Hum were performed by Pete Last.

Andy Cluer is a visual artist based in the South West, UK, working predominantly with sculpture and sound. His sonic work investigates place, both real and imagined, through the mapping of memory, sound and perceptual experience. Andy’s work often questions the relationship between auditory and visual awareness, exploring different ways of listening and how sound can be experienced through non audio mediums and similarly how images can be invoked by sound.

Drift | Hum is a body of audio works which investigates our immediate environments through the relationship between human and nature in our new, unfamiliar landscapes found during the 2020 global pandemic. By exhibiting sounds and words, the artwork focuses on how sound perception, through listening, can invoke visual perception as a way of interpreting subtle changes in our environment.

Through the quietness, intimacy and the return of undisturbed nature, undamaged by human activity in lockdown; to the reappearance of human sounds, the droning of mechanical machineries concealing the emergence of wildlife with the easing of restrictions; and the tensions and anxieties of the long term effects of human habits – these audio works are used to create an auditory visual awareness of the environment and conduct a deeper attentiveness of our relationship with the world.

The arrangement of Hum was composed through Foley sounds and human vocals and continues the reoccurring theme of the relationship between human and nature introduced in Drift. The act of touch and feel against the surfaces of a single sculptural sound object was performed to compose the Foley sounds – resulting in a droning soundscape. The vocals were used to recreate a human interpretation of this soundscape and engage a conversation between person and nature, reflecting on the sounds and our experiences of the everyday. The vocals on Hum were performed by Pete Last.

Dr Alex Cahill is Programme Lead for the BA Directing, and BA Drama and Theatre Practice courses at the University of Plymouth. Her research interests focus on the mental, spiritual and social welfare of performers and integrate Boalian techniques and sustainability education into multiple facets of performer training.

In this podcast, Dr Alex Cahill discusses the importance of showing compassion to those in our community who recently have come out of isolation or who may have experienced loss or bereavement during this time. Reflecting on the work she does with St Luke’s Hospice, Dr Cahill explores the need for compassion and suggests that growing our understanding and grace with others would be a welcomed change in our new society.

Tjawangwa Dema is the author of two books of poetry, most recently The Careless Seamstress, which won the Sillerman First Book Prize. She is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol and facilitates writing workshops around the globe. In addition to appearing in various journals and anthologies, selections of her work have been translated into languages including Spanish and German. She co-produces the Africa Writes literary festival in Bristol.

what is the heart of nothing but gesture?

we collapse meaning when we say sameness

everyone knows time is a hummingbird

scrumping seconds to hover over hunger

and who’s to say what’s worth keeping

except keeping itself

I mean that it is having that becomes king –

old sickness so slow it’s molasses in the blood

time moves differently for the oppressed

and the oppressor

scuttles and flurries

sits and shifts

and what fury it takes to keep things

is matched only by an equal fist

not violence or prayer

more a toppling

the midwife who asks the mother still bleeding –

small mouth stuck suckling firmly at her breast

her son alive but black –

what epitaph she has chosen to call him by

makes a warm leaving of this boy’s coming

she is echoing an old question

though she says she does not know it

the new mother searches for new language

the colony was there – fecund land

is now here – black body

she wants to say Methuselah but the midwife writes

Abiku

muscular time changing nothing

again

and

again

the midwife is with not alone in her question

she conflates time

like a hangman’s riddle asks

who is both born alive

and is already dead?

it is nothing to say the dead cannot resist

cannot undo

that they revolt but cannot do –

what these living do –

weighed down and fixed as they are

by stone and sand

whatever else is consequence

snake that it is

time eats at itself

its petty petty pace

nothing

changing

nothing

while the colony shifts shape

no lilt here

something hisses and hums

not even nothing begets nothing.

Dr Arun Sood is Lecturer in English at The University of Plymouth who works across Memory Studies, Romanticism, and Postcolonial literatures. He is the author of Robert Burns and The United States of America: Poetry, Print, and Memory, c. 1786-1866, and is currently developing a new project on Global Romanticisms.

In June 2020, a statue of Edward Colston, the seventeenth-century transatlantic slave trader, was forcibly removed from the centre of Bristol prompting widespread debate about statues and commemorative symbols across Britain's towns and cities. In this podcast, Dr Arun Sood discusses how does academic scholarship on memory, race, and nationhood can help us to understand this event and its wider repercussions in the wake of Black Lives Matter.