DisplacementActivities

…sounding and walking with edges:

“All is flux. Nothing stays still,”—Heraclitus

In addition to the primatological and psychological senses, I see Displacement Activities as pervasive and arguably more real than the set of clearly defined and fixed entities we commonly consider to be ‘real’ in everyday life. Everything is undergoing some form of displacement: we know this, but we often resist it. Perhaps we might imagine an impermeable Monolith at the centre of the Universe, unmoving and unchanging, but that is beside the point… or maybe it is the [abstract] point. DisplacementActivities, as a method I deploy, is not an avoidance of, but an engagement with an obscured reality where all aspects of Being are touched. Even in the realms of our Deepest Inner Peace and Stillness, we’d probably become aware of the sudden absence of DisplacementActivities—in the same way we might notice the whirring of an air conditioning system suddenly stopping, when we weren’t previously conscious of the sound at all. This phenomenon is called ‘remanence’ by Jean-François Augoyard (2005). In this liminal existence DisplacementActivities thrive.

Accordingly, my main modes of practice oscillate between sound, text and performance. These modes are often combined, glued together by images or symbols. Alongside this, walking is a constant, productive inspiration. Around 1999, I began to focus on location-based ambulant sound as a form of memory. This has shaped a lot of my subsequent activity. Examples of this work are my series of DisplacementActivities, a form of trans-locational performance, and work on Adje Both’s Sounds of Teotihuacan, GPS-based acoustic archaeology.

A key aspect of sound that I have found endlessly provocative is its ability to penetrate deeply while remaining so fleeting. Periodic ritual walking echoes this quality by heightening our awareness of Deep Time as an infinitesimal process experienced constantly yet seldom noticed.

Politics is immanent in any art form that engages with boundaries and edges, improvising freely with both human and non-human forms of obstruction. Tiny movements have the potential to be revolutionary– persistence of direction pervading through oscillation.

Martin Shaw has referred to a ‘True North in my heart’ that appears to be a form of Deep Morality conjured from the depths of biological and geological time. Several exceptional artists discovered their True North early on in life, giving acute focus to their work from an early stage. Not quite so for me, although it should have been obvious that sound would be involved somehow, see here. I seem to have wobbled around Magnetic North for most of the time, but my navigational skills have improved a little since I worked out the difference between Magnetic and True North. To this end, experimental sound remains central, and a text such as this is probably heading towards Grid North.

Waves image

vimeo: simon bradley
insta/threads: @simonbrdly
collaborations:
vimeo: ArtCouple
bandcamp: ESS<>GEE