Photographs: Phill Primus
His installations are not merely artistic artifacts but tools for social inquiry—sonic interventions that ask listeners to reconsider what it means to belong, to remember, and to inhabit a place.
The research is in conversation with the work of John Drever, R. Murray Schafer and Brandon LaBelle.
The fear of crime has carved new bounded spaces into the greater Johannesburg landscape, and with them a problematic othering of the stranger whose logic traces back to apartheid urban planning. Each of these spaces produces its own sonic environment, an audible record of the social ecology inside it.
With more than 2,000 parks and over 10 million planted trees, Johannesburg is one of the largest human-made forests in the world (Madi, 2020), and nature runs through many of the recordings. Water receives particular attention: the state of the city’s water infrastructure, and its residents’ relationship with water.
2025 · The Art House, Melville
Twenty-four tin boxes mounted on a wall as an aerial plan of the city, each holding a soundscape recorded somewhere in Johannesburg. Insert headphones, press the red button, and the recording plays: places familiar to the artist alongside places that were not, heard side by side.
2025 · The Art House, Melville
Nine linked tin boxes, each triggering soundscapes on a single theme. Press several and up to eight recordings play at once — neighbourhoods that spend considerable energy keeping apart, forced to share the same air.
Both works were produced as part of his MMus research at the University of the Witwatersrand, Sonic Boundaries, an autoethnographic study of how Johannesburg’s soundscapes shape identity and sense of place. Exhibited at The Art House, Melville, on 31 January 2025.
