Geo Phono Box

Around the Coyote is pleased to present GeoPhonoBox an exhibit curated by Chicago based visual and sonic artist Zoe Asta and Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Peck School of the Arts, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Rob Danielson. This exhibition will feature sound recordings about "place" created by sound artists, nature recordists, ethnographers, composers, pedestrians, geographers and other practitioners from around the world. Each submission in the show is to represent one geographic place within the realm of a cardboard shipping box.

Each artist was sent a cardboard shipping box in which they could include visual cues, if they desired, along with their sound project. Each box is displayed in the gallery as it was returned to us from the artists, the box serving as a document of the distance the sound piece traveled as well as the container for the visual and auditory elements of the piece.

The Sun of Tabriz (2005-7)

Box with folded prayer mat, tasbih, photography, and sound recording (duration 24'43)

I can trace the reasons why I found myself outside this small mosque in Konya (Central Anatolia, Turkey) back to a time when I was 14. You see, there was a girl at school I quite liked who played the saxophone and my cunning plan was to learn the saxophone as a way of spending more time with her. It was a 'desire for the feminine' that triggered a sequence of events that can be followed through to a conversation with a work colleague some twenty years later. This then led to a further sequence of events, apparently more unexpected, that included marriage and parenthood, travel to places I would never have imagined visiting, and many other less believable things.

Looking back on the trip to Konya and to the times before and after, and if I don't resist it too strongly, a certain awareness congeals in my mind. Listening to the recording it's easy for me to fall out of time and to return to that moment and into the state of consciousness that took me over as I sat recording, listening, feeling, sensing. Each time I return, continuing to resist not too strongly, an understanding grows that the experience of this time and place and its occurrences has always somehow been a part of me. I'm uncertain as to the uniqueness of these thoughts and feelings in relation to this particular place and am unclear about the circumstances that may have created them. However I wonder whether, as you visit the suggestion of this place and listen openly and without too much resistance, you might also find something known and sense that somewhere like it already exists, ahead, behind or within you.

Recorded on Saturday, 8 October 2005 during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan as families arrived outside a mosque broadcasting Qu'ranic recitation before the mid-afternoon prayer, using a Sony MZ-R90 minidisc and OKM II binaural mics.  

M J Sansom, January 2007