You’re invited to experience the polyphony of the mind. You’ll be plunged into darkness and subjected to an array of disorienting voices in an audible manifestation of internal proliferation. In the space between awareness and uncertainty emerges the opportunity for questioning the vocality of your internal narrators, and for an opening up to the imagination required to select which past voices you want to continue to resonate into the future, and why.

Held Down, Expanding is a new installation by Thembi Soddell that explores states of trauma and mental distress, and how these may be imagined sonically. The work focuses on the malleability of perception by exposing the listener to a situation of auditory uncertainty. This is a space of breakdown between what is real, and what is projected, expected, presumed or assumed.

Held Down, Expanding is a controlled sound art experience that places the listener inside a subconscious mind straining against the force of multiple voices. Led into a darkened room, audience members are seated within an unnerving structure that surrounds them with multiple speakers. The lights are turned out, and a shifting, abstract sound world takes hold.

There are no clear anchors in time or space and no certainty as to what is being said or heard. As the sound ends, light returns. The listener is asked to record their experience to become part of an expanding document of response displayed outside the room. This document invites reflection on the voices that shape our perception and who, or what, may be in control.