Inspired by Dicken’s novel, A Tale of Two Cities, A Hundred Seas Rising explores how literature might be implicated in the imagination and trajectories of revolutions. The installation will use the sound of 100 individual voices as a sculptural material, re-imagining Dicken’s revolutionary mob sonically by creating surges of ideological thought that reverberate across the gallery space.
In the summer of 1957, the Hundred Flowers Movement in China invited a variety of views and solutions to national policy issues. The name of the movement originated from a poem: “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.” This movement was the first of its kind in the history of the People’s Republic of China in which the government opened up to ideological criticisms from the general public. The campaign grew in momentum, from expressions of minor issues of a few to increasingly large numbers of intellectuals voicing their radical ideas, including the overthrowing of the government. Six weeks into the campaign, threatened by the overwhelming criticisms of the people, Mao Tse-tung, ordered a halt to the campaign. The result of the Hundred Flowers campaign was the Anti-Rightist Movement in which ideas against the government were suppressed, leading to the loss of individual rights and persecution.
The public will be invited to participate in the imagination of modern day revolutions. These might be personal, social, cultural, philosophical, technological, as well as political revolutions. They will be encouraged to describe the cause or structure they would like to transform, the motivating ideology for this change - including books that might have inspired their ideas, how they would mobilise others, the objectives of the revolution and how this would be achieved, i.e. through peaceful or violent means. The voice of each individual will be recorded individually and each recording will be assigned to one of the school desks, arranged in rows like a classroom environment. It is intended that the voices represent a cross-section of views from different cultural and social backgrounds. The topics for discussion might range from small personal revolutions that perhaps improves the daily life of one person, to ambitious ideas attempting to solve recurrent social ills, such as housing, distribution of money, debt, social welfare, education, the prison system, etc.
Suki Chan has been working closely with our partner, the University of Portsmouth, to record voices of participants of all ages in the School of Creative Technologies’ specialist sound and music recording centre and mobile recording studio. More information on the University’s contribution to the exhibition can be found here.
The exhibition will launch at on Friday 18 May 2012. The exhibition will run until 2 September 2012.
