The Listening Room
[A Sound Installation]

The sound installation is composed of recordings gathered during different moments of the research. Each group of sounds carries a different form of interruption, disappearance or return. They are not intended to remain as separate chapters. In the spatial installation, they may enter one another, overlap, break apart or reappear from different positions in the room.

Sea Breathing

The sea-breathing recordings began as a breathing exercise shared with a teenage singing student who had begun struggling to breathe after the murder of a close friend. The exercise later expanded to include fourteen participants. Within the installation, individual breaths move between singular and collective presence, each carrying a different rhythm and emotional state.

Singing Sessions

A month of recordings made in Iran, primarily documenting the singing sessions of the women whose voices had been entrusted to the project, was nearly lost when the SSD containing them became unreadable. Some recordings were later recovered, while others returned fragmented or distorted. Rather than treating these interruptions as failures, the installation allows them to remain part of the work.

Recovered and Damaged Recordings

A month of recordings made in Iran, primarily documenting the singing sessions of the women whose voices had been entrusted to the project, was nearly lost when the SSD containing them became unreadable. Some recordings were later recovered through the sd card of my zoom recorder, while others returned fragmented or distorted.

From “Diary of Voices”:

Listening to the recovered files, I keep wondering what an erased sound becomes when it returns. And how it returns at all. How does it work. I tried to listen through the high-pitched nothingness that fills most of the files, to see if anything could still be.

The recovered software sorts what it finds into folders. One is called Reconstructed. Another is called Deleted and Lost. The ones in Reconstructed do feel reconstructed. Like broken glass assembled into the shape of a glass. You can hear through the cracks. Some files don't even manage that. They hiccup. They stutter. They start, stop, start again, as if they can't decide whether they exist.

Protest, Streets and the Outside World

These recordings capture streets, demonstrations, and the sounds of war. Within the installation, they move through the space as shifting presences, unsettling the boundary between the outside world and the listening space.

Bahar Ara WRITER / AUDIOVISUAL ARTIST / ARTISTIC RESEARCHER

Bahar Ara

Voices seconds Before/After Disappearing

Voices Seconds Before/After Disappearing

Bahar Ara
WRITER / AUDIOVISUAL ARTIST / ARTISTIC RESEARCHER