Precarious conditions

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

"I was drawn into the recording by the complexity of the sound - the different layers: close and far / long and short / bass and treble / soft and loud. It was almost like a type of jungle.
"I was also drawn in by the story of the park - a residential area in the centre of the city where migrants pitch their tents - an arena where the potential for both clash and collaboration is so clearly played out in the common ground of the football game.
"I used the recording as a springboard for vocal improvisation. I messaged a group that I meet with irregularly and invited them to join me to record a response to the audio file.
"One Sunday evening at Music Tree music school in central London, I set up a few microphones, told the story, played the file to the assembled and off we went. The very immediate response and the tone of human voices was exactly the sound I was looking for to compliment, exaggerate, resonate with and deeply humanise all the so very complicated aspects of a migration story, much of which is out of my reach and beyond my comprehension.
"I am indebted to Jeremy, Henrietta, Dan, Evie, Kay, Sai and Tamara for their openness to and enthusiasm for the project and to Tiziana for letting us use her beautiful school space."
Maximilian Park, Brussels reimagined by Patrick Carpenter.
IMAGE: Tram Bruxelles, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration