Alexandra Spence

I spent a two-month period on residency in Hong Kong and was instantly drawn to the colour and vibrancy of the city, as well as to certain materials and objects that kept reappearing on my explorations. Billowy, gauzy construction cloth that covered spiny bamboo scaffolding, the devastatingly-inviting colourful-sheen of single-use plastics, discarded durian husks, the deep blue night-time sky made hazy/dreamy/luminous from neon lighting, lush and vibrant green foliage.

I was thinking about the small variations in the repetition of these materials, as well as the repetition of certain images and sounds. The phasing on/off flash of orange construction lights lining long stretches of road; the rhythmic phasing of multiple pedestrian crossing beeps heard simultaneously. The overhead circling of the kites (seabirds) in the sky; the below-water circling of plastic bags in the harbour.

For a little while now I’ve been cultivating an obsession with the relationships between sound, material/object and texture. How feeling can inform listening, how listening is feeling, and how this felt-listening can alter our perception of things as we are taught to know them. For me listening is acknowledging the intrinsic connections between our surroundings and ourselves. If we acknowledge the vibrancy and resonance of everyday objects how might this change our actions and thinking around them.

“My hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies.” Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter

It occurred to me, whilst writing this and listening back, that not only are materials amplified in Immaterial but certain sounds appear almost material in themselves, such as the squeak of shoes on basketball courts, and the droplets of rain on foliage. These sounds seem not to belong to shoe or court, rain or leaf, but are formed in the entwining to become a thing in themselves. It is this connectedness through sound that I am fascinated with. Through sound unequal forms can be connected: mic distortion disguises itself as crinkling plastic bags that blends into the crackling sound of shrimp underwater.

Sound waves traverse through our bodies and our surroundings, forming knots and vibrations and connections and confusions. In sound material blends with the immaterial and new imaginaries can be made, for me this is a way out. Immaterial was composed in parallel to these thoughts.
Like silky-soft milky tea tasted alongside a crispy-sweet pineapple bun.