Project summary:
Sounding Peace is a digital artwork by Dr Joseph Young that re-imagines memorialisation. It centres around conversations with military veterans and their experiences of peacekeeping/peace enforcement missions, and how this has affected their ideas about peace in the world.
As part of the project, Dr Hannah West of the CMWR collaborated with Dr Young to lead a series of workshops in Belfast, gathering veterans’ thoughts on the subject of peace and peacekeeping. Hosted at the UNTOLD Belfast site, we explored what peace looks like and sounds like for the veterans involved as well as opening up to broader discussions about peace in contemporary Northern Ireland.
Recordings from these sessions – anonymised by AI voices – will initially become part of the oral history archive of UNTOLD: The Collections & Archive, with the possibility of being used later to form part of a new audio sculpture, Sounding Peace. The project as a whole aims to install a number of sonic sculptures in public spaces in military garrison towns across the UK, and in museums and galleries internationally. The sculptures will be geo-fenced in the vicinity of existing war memorials and in museums, to prompt reconsideration of these spaces as sites of memorialisation by expressing veterans’ perspectives on peacemaking.
For further information on this project, visit the CEEUPS website.
