Christine Darragh
Polyphonic Assembly
“If a rush of troubled stories is the best way to tell about contaminated diversity, then it’s time to make that rush part of our knowledge practices. Perhaps, like war survivors themselves, we need to tell and tell until all our stories of death, and near-death and gratuitous life are standing with us to face the challenges of the present. It is in listening to that cacophony of troubled stories that we might encounter our best hopes for precarious survival.”
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
This project is inspired by a word Tsing uses--Polyphony--to reference an emergent world. Polyphony which is a musical term, references non-linear composition, assembled from many equal and independent but complementary voices. Not an unorganized cacophony, but rather a non-hierarchical series of singular voices coalescing to create a harmony. A simple round is an example of this, as is a much more complicated fugue. The point here is to illustrate an ideal to which this project aspires.
This project explores what Tsing calls polyphony and Donna Haraway names entanglement as a way to imagine a city redefining itself through the co-creation and tangled kinship of its inhabitants.Using the lens of oral history and elevating personal experience over fixed historical devices, Polyphonic Assembly imagines a city-wide district of situated narratives. It is first and foremost curatorial intervention, redefining the social agreement between neighbors and city districts. Taking its inspiration from projects which imagine an interactive overlay to city districts, It operates through eccentric instruments which amplify context-specific oral histories, rituals of listening and perspective sharing in order to curate a dynamic and fluid series of social interactions that signify a culture of shared experience through a city.