chancestreet

CHANCE STREET consists of a performative sound installation at Interlude for a Summer Night event, together with Art Night Whitechapel Gallery. The piece is an algorithmic composition in real-time. Several recordings of local soundscapes and local narratives of residents echo through radio speakers activated by a group of performers. The radios receive the sounds via FM signal, and based on a graphic score, the performers distribute the devices in the vicinity of Arnold Circus’ bandstand. The final work consists of the interaction between the architecture (with its historical peculiarities) and the expanded narrative formed by recorded material, the performers local interactions, radio signals interferences, and the composition’s stochastic musical syntax.

The Boundary Estate is a housing development in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, in the East End of London.
The estate, constructed from 1890, was one of the earliest social housing complexes built by a government. It was built on the site of the demolished Friars Mount rookery in the Old Nichol.
Soil from the foundations was used to construct a mound in the middle of Arnold Circus at the centre of the development, surmounted by an extant bandstand. The estate consists of multistorey brick tenements radiating from the central circus, each of which bears the name of a town or village along the non-tidal reaches of the Thames.

Interlude for a Summer Night was a performing arts project curated and produced by Chris Lübbert and Christina Ramos. The program consisted of a series of site-specific performances in the vicinity of the Arnold Circus bandstand. The event was part of the Art Night festival program, held in partnership with the Whitechapel Gallery.

“Interlude for a Summer Night is an event part of the festival Art Night 2017. Being an evening of performances, it takes place at Arnold Circus, a public garden in the heart of the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch, London. With over 16 performers and a wide range of acoustic instruments and objects, the artists interact with the site’s historical, environmental, and spatial aspects. Gabriel Francisco Lemos reveals the sounds that inhabit the surrounding Estate. Richard Melkonian’s performance resonates with a dark myth about the elevated structure of the Circus. At the same time, Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser use the central bandstand to narrate a series of speculative histories. The event enables the unique role of public spaces for artistic experimentation outside the formal setting of the gallery or museum. Arnold Circus then acts as a stage to introduce new voices, ideas, and interpretations, bridging cultural exchange.” text cowritten by Lübbert and Ramos.