Exhibition: Place listening at Gallery ROM. Part of the core program “the Playground” at Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019 read more here.
What if the focus of urban living was not productivity but play?
Place Listening explores how playful urban listening can expand the relationships between people and the places they inhabit. We live in a time where efficiency is favoured over play: roads are for circulation not interaction; places are designed around consumption not co-existence; we sleep not to dream but to be productive the next day. Listening and play can enable forms of awareness that challenge these ingrained norms and allow for different ways of being in the city.
Place Listening is developed with citizens and visitors of Oslo through a series of listening, playing, and walking workshops in May 2019. Recordings of the workshops have been edited into a site-specific audio walk around the area of ROM. Inside the gallery, you can experience a sound-based documentation of this audio walk and the process behind its making. Grab some headphones and let the Future guide you through a playful exploration of the stories, opinions and places of the present.
The artist duo Sachs/Westerdahl introduce the idea of place listening as an immersive, embodied and multidirectional engagement with urban space. Place Listening explores playful urban listening across different settings and media, combining site-specific audio walks based on a series of public workshops with a sound-based exhibition and a game-manual for self-directed play at ROM for Art and Architecture.
The Playground initiates a game of exploring and listening to the city reclaiming the streets as a site of joyful and thoughtful experimentation.
As children, we recognise the role of play as a critical element of human development. But as we age, play as an act of unbounded experimentation and learning is reframed as something silly and extraneous to personal development and life fulfilment. Work instead becomes the thing that we define ourselves around. However, through rituals of collective play, human societies make sense of the places we inhabit and emancipate ourselves from industrialist motives.
The Playground explores how play can challenge the utilitarian nature of public spaces driven by efficiency imperatives, and instead engender collective acts of social existence. The Playground revels in the ways in which play can free us from the confines of the growth paradigm and expand our understanding of how urban space is imagined, perceived, used, discussed, controlled and planned.
1st photograph: Sverre Chr. Jarild 2nd and 3rd photographs: Istvan Virag