The Site of Sound, 2023 (details) Infinite tape, cassette player, speaker, amp and wallpaper. Multiple dimensions: Wallpaper 248 x 124 cm, Speaker 48 x 39.5 mm
The Site of Sound explores ideas around belonging, memory, rupture, and site. Recorded in Marseille in July 2023, this soundscape was captured in the wake of nationwide riots following the killing of Nahel Merzouk—a French teenager of Algerian and Moroccan descent, shot at point-blank range by police. Rather than documenting the violence directly, the sound piece chooses to listen beneath the noise, to the quieter but equally charged textures of daily life that persisted during this moment of tension. Tanks were present the streets on the 5th of July—Algerian Independence Day—yet the atmosphere remained subdued, punctuated by intimate details: a violin practiced from a high window, distant conversations, the stillness between sounds.
Through layering composed loops, archival fragments, and field recordings, the piece is a space where time and identity fold into each other. These sonic disruptions resist linear narrative, instead illuminating the porous, colliding realities of origin, movement, and belonging. Bastille Day celebrations unfold along the beachfront days later, another national memory, another texture, positioned in tension with recent grief and unresolved legacies.
Visually grounding the work is a wallpaper made from enlarged postcards, sourced from a stall in Marseille. One card, bearing an image of the Algerian landscape, becomes a portal—its imagery tethered to a conversation in broken English about the beauty of the view. These tactile, found objects extend the soundscape into a physical space, where migration, memory, and colonial residue remain ever-present.
Commissioned by Aga Paulina Młyńczak and Nell Cardozo with support from Kelly Rappleye (16NSt Curatorial Collective), Sam Ainsley (artist and former Head of Glasgow School of Art’s MFA) and artist Janie Nicoll, this survey exhibition hosted by Patricia Fleming Gallery.
Photo credit: Photo by Aga Paulina Młyńczak, Exhibition curated by Cardozo and Młyńczak, 16NSt Curatorial Collective, hosted by Patricia Fleming Gallery
