ABOUT A PLACE

The intention of ‘About A Place’ is to experience collective music-making, mindfulness, and meditation as a way of connecting more deeply to ourselves and to the place around us. It is a guided musical meditation where we invite you to co-create a musical meditation: a temporary, sonic installation in conversation with the other artworks on show, the gallery space as a whole, and with your own inner worlds.  The piece is led by a ‘meditation leader’ and three singers who, together, set up the structure of a musical meditation and guide those congregated through a process of integrating themselves and their own sound into the space. 

Our voices tonight will leave an imprint on this site as a sort of flesh memory, or fossil record of who we were and when we were here. Silbury + East is effectively a building site, and one is reminded of the delicious naughtiness of writing messages on the walls before the DIY wallpaper goes on.  Perhaps we’re leaving a musical equivalent of that in this space tonight.

But it is also an exhibition, and in curating it Jenn Ellis has created a labyrinth of worlds within worlds: many different artists from all over the world, a multiplicity of experiences, and a wide variety of different interests and media, before we even get to the associations each and every one of you bring to everything you encounter here. 

There is layer upon layer of experience in this space. The life story of each artist, their maps of experience, intersecting with one another, intersecting with the curator, who formed a new map in her choices of places each work in relation to another – new relationalities which in turn affect each work – and places within the space. Perhaps Lucia Pizzani’s totemic sculptures stand in the ghost of a vat of ‘cream of chicken’ from the site’s days as a soup factory!

I for one associate even the name, Silbury + East, with Silbury Mound near Stone Henge, an ancient sight of worship, seemingly worlds away from this space, and yet irrevocably present now in our collective consciousness. And the exhibition itself intertwines with the building in mutually illuminatory ways – I’m struck for example by the textural points of confluence between Andrea V Wright’s drapery and overlay with the peeling walls of the space – instilling in me a sense of this space – too easily reified as industrial, dead – instead as a living organism, as a body shedding its skin ready to transform, breaking out of its chrysalis. This Victorian warehouse, once a textile and soup factory, is perhaps the most strikingly transitional of all artworks on display. 

What struck me when I first encountered this place was a sense of a vastness hiding in plain sight, easily overlooked by the destination-driven automatism of city life.  In this meditation, we invite you to soften your attention, to slow down, to redirect your attention to a sort of flânerie meets eye spy, or hide and seek – a sense of playfulness, a sense of discovery. A piece of music, a meditation, an exhibition creates a safe enough space for us to step into the unknown, to live in mystery for a time, and return from our journey with treasure, with a seed of revelation about ourselves and our place in the world, which may bloom today or in twenty years’ time. 

The space thus offers you the prospect of self-transformation.  It is transitional in the alchemical sense: it’s your sanctuary, it’s a place to step into uncertainty and transform it into possibility; to seek and to find your why and your how and your “yes, THIS is how I feel!”, “yes, THIS is me”.  Thank you, Place, for showing me the way back to myself. 

The geologist, Marcia Bjornerud, proposes a counterpoint to a shared idealisation of timelessness – what she deems society’s preoccupation with ‘time denial’, a need to run away from the integral transitions of life, at its most capitalist, the ‘forever young’ mentality, at its most esoteric, the philosopher’s stone, but in essence, the inability to contemplate the ultimate transition that is our own mortality and ephemerality in a never-ending cycling and re-cycling. Instead, she offers what she calls ‘timefulness’, the idea that, like a sedimentary rock, our existence is full to the brim with time, all times, all places, everything that ever was and everything that ever will be. Susan Sontag said that time and place exist to ensure that not everything happens to you at once – but, as the most recent Daniels film, ‘Everything, Everywhere, All At Once’, so mind-whirringly counters – perhaps it does. In just one cubic metre of sand there are roughly 70 billion grains. Each one of you is a sedimentary rock of everything you have ever experienced and encountered and everything you ever will. And in this space now, there are an unfathomable number of threads of ways of perceiving this space. 

The historical sedimentary rock, the incremental accumulation of everything at this one point on the graph of time and space, which in itself is the seed of everything to come, might spiral us down the rabbit hole to 1200, when Old Street was recorded as Ealdestrate, or 1373 as le Oldestrete – already pointing to a deeper level on the historical timescale when this ancient road might in fact be called New Street – Roman or even pre-Roman, part of a road linking Silchester and Colchester.

As you can see, the invitation that this piece offers – to use place as a starting point for a ritual of self-discovery – is rich with seemingly infinite possibilities.  We hope that the piece inspires your own journey of discovery in whatever way that’s means for you, with its undulating waves of collective music-making.

-       Music & Being 2023