:.Catherine Clover.:.Art and the City.:.

Listening, Walking and Languaging in the City: An Incomplete Field Guide to the Voices of the Birds of Amman (2023)

Presentation, Soundwalk and Participatory Voicing at the Art and the City conference, Columbia University Research Centre, Amman, Jordan June 2023, coordinated by Mellon Fellow Tijen Tunali

This conference addressess the profound and transformative influence of artworks within urban environments characterized by political contention, with a particular emphasis on their capacity to facilitate active engagement and constructive dialogue.

As Keynote Artist, my presentation included a site specific soundwalk that took place in Al-Hussein Park near to the Columbia Research Centre. As an art form, soundwalks take audiences out of the gallery, theatre and concert hall and connect participants to the sounds of a place, to listening at a specific site. A temporary intervention, soundwalks are a form of public art that enable audiences to engage socially and politically with place.

Excerpt from my contribution to the Art and the City Journal's Special Issue, published December 2023
I arrive in Amman, late. It’s dark, mild. I am picked up from the airport and driven to the hotel by a friendly driver. The moon shows through the clouds as we drive north east towards the ancient city. The moon is waning, about four days after full, big and bright, silvery, high in the sky, hanging over this place where human settlement can be traced back thousands of years. In daylight, the colour of the city is a muted primrose yellow, the colour of the desert, the colour of limestone. The expanse of the city is across seven hills, known as jabals, each of which roughly defines a neighbourhood. Today Amman’s geography is often referred to as eight circles which extend westwards.

The five scores for the participatory voicing are
Hooded Crow
Common Blackbird
Common Pigeon
Palestine Sunbird
White Spectacled Bulbul

Score for Palestine Sunbird

Score for White-Spectacled Bulbul

Audio excerpt Participatory Voicing

This short excerpt is based on our voicings of the Palestine Sunbird and the White Spectacled Bulbul, both native songbirds in the Middle East.
The Palestine Sunbird was declared the national bird of Palestine in 2015.