Within the context of our current exhibition Remedies – Lullaby Nest join London-based composer Matshidiso to reflect on her soundscape, with an exploratory workshop into sound: how we hear and how we listen, and what we listen to – both externally and internally within ourselves.

In her 2010 book, Quantum Listening, American composer and performer, Pauline Oliveros makes the distinction between hearing and listening,

‘Hearing represents the primary sense organs - hearing happens involuntarily. Listening is a voluntary process that through training and experiences produces culture. All cultures develop through ways of listening.’

For Matshidiso ‘listening within the context of music, is, to my mind, more than just the notes, the chords, the harmonies, the rhythm, it’s the spaces in between. The vibrational frequencies that continue between chords, that continue after the music stops. How do we listen to that, how do we experience that? And why, if at all, do we need to experience it?.’

Starting from the macro - the sounds we hear around us, to the micro - the sounds we hear within, this workshop will explore these ideas, asking questions rather an presenting answers, and discovering ways to create better connection with ourselves and each other.

About the exhibition
Remedies - Lullaby Nest considers the age-old tradition of the lullaby as a way of upholding time and space for rest and sleep. Artists Sasha Huber and Petri Saarikko offer this universal, commonplace remedy as an antidote to the relentless overstimulation and crisis-fuelled reality of our everyday lives, in what is often a hostile and violent world. The gallery space is reimagined as a nest, a caring and supportive structure providing time and space to rest, with an immersive soundscape by London-based composer Matshidiso. The composition includes recorded fragments of lullabies sung by members of the local community in their own languages, bringing together threads of diverse ancestral narratives passed down orally from generation-to-generation.