IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

In March 2022, feminist direct action group Sisters Uncut organised a gathering around a sonic action at Charing Cross police station in central London. One thousand rape alarms were synchronously activated in protest at the Metropolitan Police’s continuing mission to make the city unliveable for the most vulnerable and the unpropertied. This paper focusses on the performance and generation of noise in so called ‘guerrilla’ and insurgent settings, in both irremovable and dismissible forms. It considers the placement of noise in contested areas of gathering and the act of traversing the city with personal Bluetooth sound systems. The presented work, built on embodied study, is conducted at the level of the ‘urban ground’ (Amin & Lancione 2022). The piece takes the form of a live, improvised audio essay: an approach developed through recent presentations in Glasgow, Toronto and London. The latest iteration draws on my own recent sonic performance in a tunnel in South London, where ‘rave logistics’ were deployed in the organisation of a guerrilla noise show, placing emphasis on the act of re-public-ing through re-peopling and making transient contribution to a place in continual process through sound system work (Massey 1991). Considering amplification and noise generation as tools of everyday trespass, the work tends to questions of sonically delineated time in the urban context and where/how, and under what conditions these sonic instances take place. Moving towards and through the heterophonic rough musics of the contemporary city, where abolition geographies begin with the body: bodies made from space-time (Wilson Gilmour 2022).