Listening Acts | Installations

The space between making sound and hearing it holds intimacy and possibility.

In this unique exploration of the Melbourne Recital Centre, the collaborators of Chamber Made activate the public and hidden spaces with Listening Acts – a series of installations that explore listening and its role in memory, belonging and identity. You are invited into stillness and asked to consider how we perceive, process, and hold sound – whether through ancestral memory, recording technologies, or the unexpected agency of everyday objects.

Grounded in the artists’ personal histories and diverse cultural perspectives, these works reveal listening as both solitary and collective – shaped by technology, yet profoundly human.

Accordion Without Organs by Rebecca Bracewell is an unfolding work of sonic archaeology. At its centre is a single recording of an accordion transformed across multiple devices, places, and spaces. Shifting slowly over time, each iteration layers new acoustic textures while partially veiling those before it.

Cathedral Reverb by Hannah De Feyter invites one listener at a time into a sculpted sound environment that plays with memory and architecture. Inspired by classical mnemotechnics – ancient memory systems – it conjures imagined spaces through reverberant sound and image.

With Ghosts: A Choreography of Presence by Anna Liebzeit centres on a thirteen-foot plait suspended on a wall – a powerful symbol of the artist’s matrilineal connection to the Stolen Generations and the (meta)physical presence of the Indigenous body in space. The work is a dynamic representation of cultural knowledge, revealing how settler systems can often fail to comprehend Indigenous ways of being.

Chit + Chat by Monica Lim tunes into the private lives of two water coolers in perpetual dialogue. Their conversation – generated live by AI – is endless, uncanny and strangely familiar. You are invited to eavesdrop, interject and join the dialogue.

My Self in That Moment by Tamara Saulwick with Peter Knight places the listener within a constellation of voice and image – captured, distorted, digitised and redistributed. Surrounded by fragmented sounds from three extraordinary vocalists, you’ll encounter the question: whose voice is it, once it’s no longer ours?

In Silence by Thembi Soddell is a powerful solo listening experience. Drawing from letters exchanged during their Polish grandparents’ divorce, the work underscores the act of ancestral listening as a means of grappling with transgenerational trauma – unearthing latent emotion through sound.

Each work invites audiences to consider, in different ways, what it is to listen. These experiences will be complemented by a trio of live performances, Listening Acts | Performance, on Fri 22 – Sat 23 Aug, offering fleeting yet powerful moments to surrender to the sound.