Forum #16 - Debbie Kent with Helen Frosi

13 Jul 2020

Artist and PhD researcher Debbie Kent (Goldsmiths) will present some text that wrestles with the difficulty of describing and communicating the experience of soundscapes. Interdisciplinary artist, curator and producer Helen Frosi joins us as respondent.

Debbie Kent: I work with sound, cities and walking. I’m currently making a set of audio walks tracking transformations in the urban soundscape for a practise-based PhD in the Visual Cultures department. I work with the spontaneous and transient; with disassembling language and retrieving detritus from the cracks in the everyday. In the past I’ve exchanged words from Bruce Springsteen lyrics with members of the public, reassembled news stories using only the conjunctions and articles, and read from the writings of George Perec after putting the pages through a shredder. Recently I have been working in collaboration with Russian artist Alisa Oleva as the Demolition Project, making work that explores ways of reimagining the city and our relationship with it, in London, Berlin, Belgrade, Vilnius, Ekaterinburg and Moscow. – dejakay.co.uk

Helen Frosi is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and producer whose practice pivots around ecological thought, poetics, aspects of gifting and alternative forms of economy, with a focus on the creative, social, and political dimension of sound and listening. Her practice manifests as process, and necessitates collaborative, cross-disciplinary work, communal projects and collective activities. Helen is Co-Curator of Longplayer Day, a festival focusing on time, duration and long-term and ecological thinking, and her latest project, EnCOUnTErs, sits at the nexus between art and ecology, with a focus on the sonic imagination. Helen is Director of SoundFjord a nomadic curatorial platform focussed on sound-related research and practice, Founder of Visible Near Midnight Recordings for works that fall between the genre gaps, and a honorary research fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. – soundfjord.org