For Those Who Have Forgotten How to Cry
2024

Site-specific sound installation, Gillett Square, Hackney, London

Duration: 26 minutes

 

Commissioned/presented as part of If Mi Nuh Laugh Mi Cry! Hackney Art Activism Festival. Created in response to the Hackney Community Defence Association Archive 

 

“How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?”

— Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being 

 

For Those Who Have Forgotten How to Cry is a site-specific sound installation installed in Gillett Square, Hackney.

 

The work was created in response to the Hackney Community Defence Association archive for If Mi Nuh Laugh Mi Cry! Hackney Art Activism Festival, attending to histories of anti-Black racism, community organising, grief and resistance held within the site and its surrounding contexts. 

 

The installation was composed primarily from field recordings made with hydrophones and microphones at the source of the River Lea and at other points along the river as it moves through Hackney. These recordings formed a 26-minute audio landscape, played on a continuous loop through speakers placed beneath a raised wooden deck in Gillett Square. 

 

The work brought the unseen and unheard matter of the River Lea into contact with the public space of the square. Beneath the deck, water sounds, environmental recordings and fragmented lamenting voices created a submerged sonic environment: a space of sorrow, release, memory and reflection. 

 

The raised wooden platform suggested both a stage and a vessel. Through this arrangement, the work traced relationships between Black diasporic life, bodies of water, public space and the ongoing conditions of racialised violence and survival. 

 

For Those Who Have Forgotten How to Cry offered listening as a temporary site of witness.