Deptford High Street from the North, taken on 13 June, 2015
I Am Living in Deptford (2015)
I Am Living in Deptford (2015) is a collection of field recordings made during a soundwalk along Deptford High Street, South East London, on 13 June 2015. Working from the tradition of the objet trouvé, the artist walked the street with a binaural microphone, purchasing eight objects from local shops. Each field recording is paired with the object acquired at that exact location and moment — the recording functioning as the acoustic certificate of the finding, fixing the object's origin in sound rather than in memory.
Deptford High Street in 2015 was one of South East London's most ethnically layered street markets, shaped by successive waves of West African, Caribbean, Vietnamese, and Chinese diasporic settlement. The objects reflect this compressed cultural geography: a bamboo wind chime decorated with green pentagonal stars, evoking simultaneously East Asian craft and Caribbean iconography; a Falcon pie dish of unmistakably British domestic character; a willow pattern dish — a British-manufactured aesthetic fiction of Chinese visual culture in mass production since the 18th century; an incense pot; a seashell necklace; a mat; a coffee; and a set of counterfeit watches. Each object, before the recording is paired with it, is already a small archive of colonial trade routes, cultural mixing, and diasporic improvisation along a single South East London street.
I Am Living in Deptford (2015) 是一組田野錄音作品，於2015年6月13日在南倫敦德普特福德高街進行聲音漫步期間錄製而成。藝術家從現成物（objet trouvé）的傳統出發，帶著雙耳錄音麥克風步行於街道之上，沿途在各家店舖購入八件物品。每段田野錄音與在該確切地點和時刻購得的物品相互配對——錄音作為「發現」這件物品的聲音憑證，將其來源固定於聲音之中，而非記憶之中。
2015年的德普特福德高街，是南倫敦族裔文化層次最為豐富的露天市集之一，由西非、加勒比海、越南及華人移民社群歷經數代定居所塑造。這些物品映照出這種壓縮的文化地理：一支以綠色五角星裝飾的竹風鈴，同時喚起東亞竹製工藝傳統與加勒比海圖像符號；一個帶著毫無疑問英式家居氣息的Falcon烤盤；一個柳樹圖案的碟子——自18世紀起大量生產、英國製造業對中國視覺文化的美學虛構；一個香爐、一條貝殼頸鏈、一張墊子、一杯咖啡，以及一套仿製手錶。每件物品在與錄音配對之前，已然是一份記錄殖民貿易路線、文化混融與移民就地求存的微型檔案，濃縮於南倫敦的一條街道之上。
