Antifascist Silent Disco (2019). Sound and photographs.

This piece, in which compositions weaving together field recordings made at anti-racist and anti-fascist protests in France, the UK, and the US are played through individual headphones and heard alongside a series of photographs, explores contemporary modalities of listening that allocate dissent and resistance to either silence or inarticulate noise—which in the end amount to the same thing. Most of the recordings were made in the Parisian banlieue where such listening is symptomatic of a (post-)colonial division between insider and outsider. In the broader global context, such listening is apiece with authoritarian variants of neoliberalism which displace economic inequality and crises of democratic representation onto partitions of audibility between heard and unheard. Reflecting on the paradox of the heard unheard or silent noise, the silent disco genre invites participants to experience a certain collective synchronicity in the absence of shared audibility and thus to reflect on the challenges of listening across ever-deepening social divides in the struggle against the resurgent far right.

Antifascist Silent Disco was first exhibited at the Akademie Schloss Solitude Sommerfest in Germany in June 2019 where visitors put on silent disco headsets to listen under the vaults of the rococo palace and outside with a spectacular view over the valley.

It was subsequently selected to be shown as part of a group show, States of Sensing, in the Projektraum Römerstrasse 2A in Stuttgart in November–December 2019 alongside work by Karolina Grzywnowicz, Tom Rosenberg, and Aykan Safoğlu.