Streets of London explores the theatre of peoples’ bodies through absence and virtual re-compositions. Mirroring the theatre of London, which is rooted in the literary tradition therefore assigning the power of imagination to the spoken word, this piece is composed as a sound piece, a meditation on the act of seeing and listening, conceived to stimulate a process of internal visualisation. The aural composition is split from the realistic universe of the images that produce them to tease out mental representations and personal memories of “others”. As such, the friction between time and space can only be falsely reconciled by CCTV footage, as people’s bodies remain trapped in their status of objects, either manipulated for consumption or controlled for national security. As the act of viewing seems to have lost its innocence, the reconstruction of people images in one’s own mind can become a revolutionary act with the potential of opening up new routes to contemporary humanism and cultural understanding. Light and earth remain there, unmoved and yet ever changing in their perennial ritual of the everyday life. Red soil from China’s Yunnan province is mixed with bark as a symbol of the mixed histories between the two countries.
English
