“The pavilion proposes a holding place – holding the ambition of a performative, political intervention, a pavilion which speaks of multiple acts of home; holding stories, energies and histories of movement – and the myriad ways in which people have made a city a place to take hold and, in turn, a place in which to be held.” – Sumayya Vally

The Listening to the City programme engages with a set of sonic landscapes from selected London neighbourhoods, paying attention to existing and lost spaces of gathering and belonging, with particular relevance to migrant communities across the city.

Conceived as a summer programme from July – September 2021 developed by Serpentine Education, Civic Projects and 2021 Pavilion architect Sumayya Vally, the programme of sound commissions, workshops, education packs and listening sessions will offer ways of listening to the city. At a time when personal listening devices have become ubiquitous, shared spaces to listen are increasingly rare. If how we listen determines what we hear, this programme encourages us to unplug, slow down, and embrace modes of active listening, making connections between histories of struggle, community care and organising.

As part of the programme we are working in collaboration with artists Ain Bailey, Jay Bernard, collaborative publishing practice OOMK, the Becontree Forever Arts and Culture Hub at Valence Library, Radio Ballad’s partner New Town Culture, London Borough of Barking and Dagenham and young people’s organisations in South London.

Programme Schedule:

August – 17 October, free onsite pack, daily, Serpentine Pavilion DOSH, developed by Jay Bernard in collaboration with OOMK and Serpentine Education

A deck of cards about money and the way it shapes our world, for 7-14 year olds, copies are free and available on-site, and distributed to young people throughout the city.

23 July, 7:30pm, Serpentine Pavilion & Livestream Crystals of this Social Substance: the conversation

Join us for the launch of Jay Bernard’s new sound commission for 2021 Serpentine Pavilion. More information.

24 July – 25 August, Daily, Serpentine Pavilion Jay Bernard, Crystals of this Social Substance

A new site-specific sound piece by Jay Bernard, inside Serpentine Pavilion, daily. More information.

24 July, 10am – 5pm, Serpentine Pavilion Listening to the City Day

10am – 1pm, Community Morning, Serpentine Pavilion will be closed as we welcome invited community groups to visit.

2pm – 5pm, Family Day: Money Machine, One of My Kind (OOMK) invite children and their families to design and print their own currency in the Serpentine Pavilion. Family Days are free, drop-in events that are most suitable for families with children aged 7 – 14, but all are welcome. More information.

14 August, 2pm – 5pm, Serpentine Pavilion Listening to the City Day

2pm – 5pm, Family Day: Money Machine, One of My Kind (OOMK) invite children and their families to design and print their own currency in the Serpentine Pavilion. Family Days are free, drop-in events that are most suitable for families with children aged 7 – 14, but all are welcome. More information.

26 August – 24 September, Daily, Serpentine Pavilion Sound Commission, Ain Bailey, 2021

A new site-specific sound piece by Ain Bailey, inside Serpentine Pavilion, daily. More information to be announced soon.

10 September, 8pm – 10pm, Serpentine Pavilion Performance: Ain Bailey and Imani Robinson

A site-specific performance in the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion. Booking information to be announced soon.

6 November, 3pm – 5pm, Valence Library Listening Session: Becontree Broadcast Station

Join us in Valence Library, for live listening sessions with Sumayya Vally and invited artists. Booking information to be announced soon.

I wanted to think of the music that I installed in the new pavilion as a sort of sonic garden – a concentrated park within the real park. – Brian Eno

For his contribution to Back to Earth, Brian Eno has composed a layered, stratified construction of sonic material, titled IN A GARDEN (2021) that moves through the Serpentine Pavilion 2021, from the earth beneath visitors’ feet to the space above their heads. He writes:

This piece started life two years ago as what I call ‘country music’. In my use of the phrase that doesn’t involve banjos and cowboys, but is intended to be a music that is an evocation of being in a landscape, in a place.

The Serpentine Gallery really is a place, and it’s in the middle of a park. I wanted to think of the music that I installed in the new pavilion as a sort of sonic garden – a concentrated park within the real park. A garden is a place in which all sorts of things are brought together, and interest is created by spacing and contrast and the unexpected unfolding of the planting as it develops.

This piece is what I call a generative piece: it’s a set of procedural rules allowed to work themselves out. Usually I do this in such a way that the piece changes all the time. In this instance however, because I wanted to take advantage of the L-Acoustics L-ISA spatialisation technology, the piece is essentially a long recording, looped. So if you come at midday two days in a row you’ll hear almost the same music. Not exactly the same, because there are some random elements within the spatialisation itself. If it were a garden, it would be as though some of the plants had moved a bit during the night…

Thinking about gardens, and about why we like gardens, has been a fruitful tangent for me. People tend to imagine that making art is like making architecture – that you have a ‘plan’ or a ‘vision’ in mind before you start and then you set about making it. But my feeling is that making art can be more usefully thought of as being like gardening: you plant a few seeds and then start watching what happens between them, how they come to life and how they interact. It doesn’t mean there’s no plan at all, but that the process of making is a process of you interacting with the object, and letting it set the pace. This approach is sometimes called ‘procedural’. I call it ‘generative’. Just as a garden is different every year, a piece of generative art might also be different each time you see or hear it. The implication of this is that such a work is never really finished – there is never a final state.

Sonic Description

For each of the sound commissions taking place in 2021 Serpentine Pavilion designed by Counterspace, Serpentine has worked with a sound artist to commission a written sonic description. For Brian Eno’s IN A GARDEN, Elif Shafak has written a text-based translation of the piece.

The sonic descriptions are part of on–going research into how our programme can be more accessible to D/deaf and low hearing audiences. Research is conducted within Serpentine’s Access Working Group and through the Artist Residency focusing on disability and inclusion.

Brian Eno, IN A GARDEN, 2021 was commissioned by Serpentine for Back to Earth, Sound Gallery, and the Serpentine Pavilion 2021 designed by Sumayya Vally, Counterspace. It was curated by Rebecca Lewin and Kostas Stasinopoulos and produced by Holly Shuttleworth.

2021 Serpentine Pavilion sound commissions were supported by L-Acoustics Creations, and presented at the Pavilion in L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound.

Sound Gallery is produced by Reduced Listening.

How does money affect our present day lives and how will it shape our future?

Join us daily at 5pm for a fully immersive listening experience. Crystals of this Social Substance runs for a total of 41 minutes. We encourage you to time your visit accordingly so that you can listen to the artwork in its entirety.

Crystals of this Social Substance is a new sound work by the artist Jay Bernard, commissioned by Serpentine Education for Listening to the City.

The work was developed through a series of intimate workshops staged during summer 2021, in which the artist invited eight young people to talk about money. Bernard locates the piece in the specific triangle of London’s Tulse Hill, Brixton and Herne Hill neighbourhoods, an area where they grew up, currently live, and situate as “a curious mix of deprivation and hyper-privilege”.

Together they played the ubiquitous capitalist board game Monopoly, and the cult 1978 socialist board game Class Struggle, in order to reflect on and question the world views the games propose. The afternoon workshops, which also encompassed visioning and free writing exercises created space for the young people to describe how it feels to live in their neighbourhood and think about how their experiences are mediated by global economic forces.

The conversations, which revolve around class, economics and inequality, result in a new sound commission for the Serpentine’s Listening to the City programme. Crystals of this Social Substance features the voices of young people as they find the language to articulate their personal relationships to money and grapple with how and why it is unevenly distributed across the city.

‘These are teenagers from very different walks of life, some on the cusp of adulthood, who demonstrate one of the truisms of London, which is that the wealthy and the poor have always lived side by side, yet the feeling that this embodied borderland evokes is far more difficult to access. Quite what a frontier it is was demonstrated by the walls that went up, the contradictions uttered, the conflicted body language that is perceptible if invisible in audio. I want to take the workshop out into the public so that we might encounter our own unarticulated truths about what money does to and for us, how it splits our allegiances, how it weighs on our consciences, rules our lives, shapes the places we live.’ – Jay Bernard

Crystals of this Social Substance was developed with young people from Alleyn’s School, The Baytree Centre, Brixton Youth Theatre, Dulwich College, High Trees Community Development Trust, and ML Community Enterprise. The young people were paid for their time.

With thanks to Impact Brixton and Glows Tulse Hill.

In this episode of Sound Gallery, Torkwase Dyson’s work embodies breathing as an intimate connection to the environment, and as a spatial and political act.

In anticipation of the Back to Earth exhibition and the 2022 Serpentine Pavilion opening in June, we’re launching Sound Gallery by releasing four commissions that were part of a public listening and events programme at the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Sumayya Vally of Counterspace. At the Pavilion, Torkwase Dyson’s Breathtaking: On Black Beauty and Other Necessary Indeterminacies was presented as a spatial test and accompanied by drawings the artist had made in response to – and as an extension of – her own breathing. The sounds of this mark-making are woven into the work alongside archival recordings of bodies breathing in order to speak, sing and protest, and the textural sounds of Dyson’s own inhalations and exhalations.

Dyson is interested in the politics of Black bodies and their right to breathe. This work was created in an era where we have limited and unequal access to clean air, when the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disproportionately affect communities of colour, and when asserting Black peoples’ right to breathe is central to resistance against police brutality. Through her sound commission, Dyson constructs a soundscape of refusal, improvisation and precarity.

Breathtaking: On Black Beauty and Other Necessary Indeterminacies is also Dyson’s contribution to Back to Earth, Serpentine’s ongoing, multi-year project which responds to the climate crisis in collaboration with over sixty artists, thinkers, designers, and scientists. The commission is informed by Dyson’s long-term thinking around liquidity as a concept through which to explore environmental concerns. Other commissions from Back to Earth – including artist-led tools and campaigns – can be experienced at the project exhibition this summer, and through previous Serpentine Podcasts.

Serpentine Pavilion 2021 26 August - 24 September 2021, Daily at 11am and 5pm *(10th + 17th September 11am & 4pm / 11th September 11am only) FREE

A new sound work by the artist Ain Bailey, Atlantic Railton takes its name from Atlantic Road and Railton Road in Brixton, South London. Home to significant Black British intellectuals and activists including C.L.R James and Olive Morris, both locations were also the meeting points for various social movements and community groups including the Black Panthers, Brixton Black Women’s Group, and where the Brixton uprising took place in 1981. Bailey draws on these histories, weaving familial and personal relationships with different sites of community organising that were active between the early 1970s to the early 2000s; including Brixton Neighbourhood Community Association, Big Up and Lambeth Women’s Project.

The piece brings together a series of intimate conversations led by the artist’s collaborators Sharon Elliott, Claudette Parry, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinksi and Marc Thompson that sonically reflect on the memories, actions and relationships held in these sites of community care and resistance. The sound composition is a constellation of the collaborator’s voices, new field recordings from the sites referenced, archival sounds of protest and traditional steel-pan songs played by Matthew Phillip from Mangrove Steelband.

Atlantic Railton is a dedication to people and places that are no longer with us, tenderly evidencing the experiences of belonging and connection held in these spaces, which communities continue to feel the effects of today.

Ain Bailey & Imani Mason Jordan: Atlantic Railton: LIVE – In collaboration with interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor and independent curator Imani Mason Jordan (fka Robinson) Bailey will perform a live extension of Atlantic Railton followed by a DJ set from Rabz Lansiquot on the 10th of September at the Serpentine Pavilion 2021 designed by Counterspace.

‘When thinking of activism and community organising, and in particular those spaces that are no longer with us, I am compelled to think about a number of organisations in Brixton that instilled in me a foundational and tender way of working with people. When thinking about my own sonic story in relation to these places, one particular memory is of the Rollocks Steel Band family rehearsing outside 5 Leeson Road, perhaps on their way to the Notting Hill Carnival. 5 Leeson Road was formerly a social centre for West Indian Senior Citizens, a part of Brixton Neighbourhood Community Association. My mother Bevolyn Bailey managed the luncheon club.’ – Ain Bailey, 2021

Community sites

The Brixton Neighbourhood Community Association (BNCA) was established in Brixton in 1972. The organisation, led by Courtney Laws OD, OBE was committed to changing the black condition against a backdrop of racism and severe inequalities; providing services tailored to every aspect of the community from “the cradle to the grave”. From counselling and advice, employment training, liaising with the police, and family support to education and support for the West Indian Elderly and so much more. The BNCA was the largest Black voluntary organisation in Lambeth for 25 years changing thousands of lives and inspiring many more.

Big Up, was an HIV support and prevention organisation, which ran from 1994-2006. Set up, ran, and managed by Black gay men, Big Up aimed to provide culturally specific and appropriate advice, information and support to Black gay men infected and affected by the HIV crisis in the UK.

Lambeth Girl’s Project, later Lambeth Women’s Project (LWP) was located at 166a Stockwell Lane until eviction in 2012 and provided a variety of crucial services and maintained several significant partnerships for over 30 years (1979 – 2012). It was considered a lifeline to women in Lambeth, not just locally but also nationally.

Ain Bailey, Atlantic Railton, 2021 was commissioned by Serpentine Civic Projects for Listening to the City and was curated by Amal Khalaf, Elizabeth Graham, Layla Gatens and produced by Holly Shuttleworth. 

Contributions from Sharon Elliott, Claudette Parry, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Marc Thompson and Matthew Phillips, Mangrove Steel Band.

Sound commissions supported by L-Acoustics Creations, presented in L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound.