the head operates as a presence; it reminds us of the very physical phenomenon of sound as a three-dimensional, spatial occurrence, of which the ear is critical. it’s abstractness – headless, or perhaps bodiless, depending on how you look at it – is it’s context, for whilst sound is present, it is also fleeting ~ here-one-minute, and gone-the-other; the head is not stable: graffiti renders audible these utterances of historical (in)significance and archives them for tomorrow. this head is not my head; but this is my ear, and with it, I listen!

the history of the sound mirrors is one of research, trial, and error; enigmatic, ruins, suggestive of a previous civilisation’s strange practices.

‘between two rusted, frayed buttresses, among the declarations of love and lust, is a single startling message: "I hate myself and I want to die." Whatever the occasion (tragic? comic?) of the inscription, it is impossible not to read it as emanating from the mirror itself: a final, obscure communication from an object which has lived too long, while the catastrophe it was intended to avert has not ceased to arrive.’1

sounds become like bruises, tender and evocative of the action to which they refer, such as is in the work of film director Jacques Tati2 where reflection mediates between, as Gillian Rose has described it, ‘[a] desire for presence and [an] acceptance of absence.’3

graffiti has rendered audible these utterances of historical (in)significance and archives them for tomorrow.

1/ 70, Listening for the Enemy, Brian Dillon, Cabinet ISSUE 12 The Enemy Fall 2003 Winter 2004
2/ "Material Sounds: Jacques Tati and Modern Architecture," Architecture and Film II, special profile n.143 of Architectural Design (AD), v.70 n.1, (January 2000), guest edited by Bob Fear, pp. 26-31.
3/ Mourning becomes the law : philosophy and representation / Gillian Rose

thomas barnes