Term Project Outline: Sound and Space in Tensta

My term project examines the use of audio in urban space as a means for delivering and sharing information and for creating the conditions for participation in community. This sound project focusing on two areas

– history
– culture

This project is inspired by a found reel-to-reel tape containing an interview with exiled Somalian writer Nuruddin Farah (b. 1945). On the tape (made sometime in the mid-1980s in Sweden), Farah speaks in English of his writing, as well as the Somalia he grew up in and of the diaspora and his exile. Today the Somalian diaspora is an important part of the identity and culture of Tensta. But how is that connection developing today as a place-dependent culture and what are the media available to it?

The reel-to-reel tape recorder is an early example of read/write media. I would like to extend this read/write idea as a way of framing contemporary Tensta. Firstly by the digitization of historic material and making it available to all. Secondly by making it possible for the Somalian culture of Tensta to be heard in the broader national and international arenas. This will be accomplished in this project in two ways:

1. An audio installation in Tensta Konsthall centered on the complete digitized recorded interview with Nurruddin Farah found on the reel-to-reel tape . I want to make this interview freely available to the Somalian community in Tensta. The interview will be available as an Mp3 download online from a QR-code produced for the installation and distributed on cards in Tensta Konsthall.

2. Building a website where audio of Tensta stories can be uploaded and played in the installation at Tensta Konsthall. I intend to create some sound pieces myself by speaking to locals in Tensta but the installation will allow people to record their own storied in Tensta Konsthall.

I want to suggest a continuity between Farah’s stories and the Somalian community in Tensta. Subjects such as Islam, Patriarchy, Family, Exile, Literature, Education and the Culture are themes that could be considered in the installation.

I plan to support the audio content of the installation with a hashtag cloud on a screen using the #Tensta tag and gathering tweets in real time over the duration the installation is in place. Tweets about “#Tensta”

Tweets by @JimBarrett

The principle; of read/write culture, of the invisibility of locally created/sourced information is the focus I am trying to get at. I suppose that is what graffiti is on one level, as art and as information. I would love to do a graffiti project, but its not very legal and I am not an artist in that sense. Instead its digital graffiti and the text is made of voices. But how can I make a medium for the voices, how to collect or channel them and then give them space in the konsthall or in a series of stations or points around Tensta.

More police being deployed in Tensta and “300 professional criminals” being targeted in the area http://www.svt.se/nyheter/regionalt/abc/fler-poliser-i-tensta-och-rinkeby

As I was traveling to work the other morning (in Sunderbyberg), an announcement came over the loudspeaker that the train would not be stopping in Tensta “on the direction of the police” –  they must have been searching for someone and did not want them catching the train I thought.

 

I just wonder what the narrative is from the people, the youth in the area and how such an example can be used to create a medium for expression?

Marshall Berman – Emerging From The Ruins

City College turns to one of its own to present the Ninth Annual Lewis Mumford Lecture on Urbanism: Distinguished Professor of Political Science Marshall Berman, who will speak 6:30 p.m. Thursday, May 2, in The Great Hall, Shepard Hall. His topic will be “Emerging From the Ruins.” The talk is free and open to the public.

A philosopher and urbanist, Professor Berman will speak to how much of urban creativity grows out of urban disaster and disintegration. As examples, he will cite New York, which has undergone a remarkable recovery since its fiscal crisis of the 1970s, and Paris, which was burned down in the 19th century, but rose to become the capital of world modernism in the 20th century. He will also discuss the role of the process he calls “urbicide” or murder of a city.

Professor Berman grew up in a South Bronx neighborhood that was destroyed to make way for the Cross Bronx Expressway. A graduate of Columbia University, he holds a PhD from Harvard University and serves on the editorial board of “Dissent” magazine. In addition, he is a regular contributor to “The Nation,” “New York Review of Books,” “Bennington Review,” “New Left Review,” “New Politics” and the “Village Voice Literary Supplement.”

He is the author of several books, the most influential being “All that is Solid Melts Into Air,” published in 1982, which explores the meaning of modernity for the individual in several different cultures. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages including Farsi, Chinese, Polish and Hebrew.

His other books include:

•  “The Politics of Authenticity,” (1970) about the theme of self-alienation and self-development as it is first imagined in the Enlightenment.

•  “Adventures in Marxism,” (1999) which explores the writings of Marx and such intellectuals as Herbert Marcuse, Edmund Wilson and Isaac Babel, who have wrestled with the meaning of Marxism in the 20th century.

•  “On the Town,” (2006) an exploration of urbanism through “100 years of spectacle” in and around Times Square.

Currently he is working on a book called “The Romance of Public Space,” which will begin with the ancient Greeks and the Bible and cover various periods of modern city life, culminating with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

About the Lewis Mumford Lecture 

Named for writer, architecture critic and urbanist Lewis Mumford, who attended City College, the series invites the world’s most distinguished urbanists to speak freely and publicly about the future of cities.  The series was initiated and is organized by the Graduate Program in Urban Design in the Spitzer School of Architecture. Jane Jacobs, author of several seminal books on urbanism, including “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” delivered the first lecture in 2004.