AURAL POSTCARDS: ON IDENTITY, MEMORY, AND DISPLACEMENT
Displacement can evoke a strong desire for communication and dialogue, bringing about memories and feelings of belonging that are transformed or lost as individuals move through the unfamiliarity of new territories. Aural Postcardsis a practice-as-research audio-visual ethnography project that explores experiences of displacement in the United Kingdom. The project approaches the notion of displacement broadly, to include transitional relocation processes but also other essential experiences such as birth (being born and giving birth). Aural Postcards seeks to broaden our understanding of displacement, inviting audiences to engage with the possibility of considering all individuals as having undergone experiences of displacement and migration journeys at some level.By using recorded oral testimonies, soundscape composition and photography, Aural Postcards emerges as a device to creatively express the impact of the other in the development of (vulnerable) identities. All stories integrating the project share a certain commonality: the necessary engagement and interrelation with the other (the core experience of displacement) is expressed through the tension between the potential of the aural (the participants’ own voices, the sonic signatures of a place) and the concrete boundaries of the still image.