When: 17:15-18:30, 19/10/2023
Where: MacLaren Stuart Room (G.159), Old College, University of Edinburgh
What: Talk by Dr James Parker (University of Melbourne)
UNESCO Week of Sound events are free, book a ticket.
Co-hosted by the research project Sonic Conditions of Detention, the Global Justice Academy and the Reid School of Music’s Music Research Seminars.
Between 2013 and 2017, nearly 2,000 men who had arrived in Australian territory seeking asylum were forcibly transferred ‘offshore’ to Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and detained there by the Australian Government. In 2019, some of these men were moved to hotels in Australia on medical grounds, and left to languish while the Covid-19 pandemic set in around them. This presentation offers some reflections on an artwork produced by six of them, which I co-curated.
where are you today by the Manus Recording Project Collective comprises 4 hours of audio-recordings made inside Australia’s hotel detention regime. Throughout August 2020, subscribers received a text message with a new ten-minute recording, along with their distance from the recording’s maker. The result is a rare sonic archive of hotel detention, and contemporary border politics more generally. But it was also a strange and powerful thing to experience in real-time, as the event of ear-witnessing interrupted subscribers’ lives, putting them in new forms of relation with the detained artists each day. What lessons, I wonder, might this artwork have for understanding the sonic experience of carcerality, and the peculiar violences of hotel detention, as it continues to expand in the UK and beyond?
Biography
James Parker is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School, who works across legal scholarship, art criticism, curation, and production. He is a current ARC DECRA fellow, former visiting fellow at the Program for Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School for Government, and sits on the advisory board of Earshot, an NGO specialising in audio forensics. His most recent work, with Sean Dockray and Joel Stern, is on machine listening.