Antifascist Silent Disco

This sound and photo installation was created for the 2019 Sommerfest of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, where Naomi Waltham-Smith is a fellow in 2019–2020. The sonic compositions weave together field recordings made at antiracist and antifascist protests and are played through individual headphones from a silent disco kit, with photographs projected onto the walls of the Rocco Schloss. This project explores contemporary modalities of listening that allocate dissent and resistance to either silence or inarticulate noise—which in the end amount to the same thing. Most of the recordings were made in the Parisian banlieue where such listening is symptomatic of a (post)colonial division between insider and outsider. In the broader global context, such listening is apiece with authoritarian variants of neoliberalism which displace economic inequality and crises of democratic representation onto partitions of audibility between heard and unheard. Reflecting on the paradox of the heard unheard or silent noise, the silent disco genre invites participants to experience a certain collective synchronicity in the absence of shared audibility and thus to reflect on the challenges of listening across ever-deepening social divides in the struggle against the resurgent far right.

A teaser trailer for the installation can be found out at https://www.auralflaneur.com/trumpism