Displaced, 2016
Sound recording

The original sound for Displaced was gathered in Chittagong, Bangladesh, where the world’s disused ships are manually disassembled and recycled. While visiting Chittagong, I gained access to a shipbreaking yard and a modern steel factory, where I made ambient audio recordings for my archive.

Some months afterwards, I was invited to join the 2016 edition of the Hardbakka Ruins Project in Bergen, Norway, where participants visited a variety of historic industrial buildings and explored questions about outsourcing, automation, and care. For the concluding exhibition, I made a sound composition from my archive and played it back inside a six-story high chamber of the grain silo that has become the Bergen School of Architecture. I then re-recorded the composition while it demonstrated the postindustrial structure’s natural resonant frequencies articulated by the sound of outsourced precarious labor.