The dying art of food marketplace shouting
Sound art performance in public space
Huddersfield food market, Kirklees- May 2019
In alliance with
Kirklees Markets (UK)
In collaboration with Joanne Mansley (UK) shouting
My initial focus on kitchen and cooking sounds found, in late 2018, an interesting turnaround when I visited the Ballaro food market in Palermo, Italy in 2018 as it was illustrated in the Chapter 2 of this thesis. Food here presented me with its possibility of creating social assemblages that occur before the preparation and consumption of a dish, which I later connected with Jane Bennet’s theories about the ontological autonomy of the materiality of food. The sounds of food market shouting, and murmuring crowds emerged as a new category of food sounds in my work that operates under its own considerations. Here, the focus is on the human voice as a force that communicates and agitates these vibrating ensembles.
After my visit to Ballaro, I continued recording food markets in Valparaíso in Chile, Huddersfield, Dewsbury and London in the UK, and Bogotá and Medellín in Colombia. Furthermore, my colleagues Cyanching Wu and Tēnn Uí recorded sounds for this project in marketplaces in Taiwan, and Ilona Krawczyk did the same in different markets in Poland. The archive of food market sounds that I gathered was completed by sounds made by other recordists and was licensed for use where the work of The London Survey was of great inspiration.
This is a dying art but as long as I live, I will keep this going.
In my work with Joanne and Tony, the potential obsolescence of shouting became evident. It was clear that with their shouting they were not just advertising food ingredients, but they were also resisting and defending the art in their practice. Here the idea of Social Sculpture281 of Joseph Beuys resonated with the Deleuzian idea of resistance where food trading shouting emerged with great possibility. The resistance of market shouting against obsolescence is a matter already examined by Camilo Andrés Moreno Hernández282 who suggests that the volume and vibrance of food markets operate resisting dynamics of communication that favour exclusion:
In the market squares there is a place for communication and debate of the everyday, of the events of the neighbourhood, of the city, of the nation. There, the popular knowledge generated around food, medicine and other types of meaningful learning is transmitted. They are shown as places of resistance to the dynamics of global communication that in some cases are constituted around a character of exclusion. For Linda O Keeffe, who studied the soundscape of Smithfield in Dublin, on Henry Street from 2009 to 2014, the quest to bring order, prescribed by official agents, have slowly silenced market shouting here. The cultural imposition of silence is revealed in studies by George Klein in his essay Site-Sounds, and by Christabel Stirling in her article Sound Art/Street Life. Here, she examines a series of public space works like Bridge Links by London-based artist Esther Ainsworth, where Stirling observes the spectators of this piece when perceiving their routines affected, that they,
(…) experienced a different kind of fear: a fear that their complacent right to space was being toppled; fear of an impending loss of unity and certainty over a particular geographical location; a fear that challenged rather than affirmed their identifications.
For Stirling, market shouting, and other forms of public space acoustics have drawn antagonism from middle and upper classes as was verified in London in Victorian times when the Silence- seekers were paid to contain and remove street music and market shouters from doing their job. Here it is important to consider that the agitating and vibrant materiality of these sounds can dig up the structures of society exhibiting how these structures are assembled. The research of Moreno, Keeffe, and Stirling suggests that market shouting challenges the idea that quietness should predominate over loudness in public places, which is an idea rooted in the dominance of middle and upper-class privilege in public spaces.
For 30 minutes, Huddersfield’s market resonated with accents and lexicons from around the world celebrating the polycultural expressions and exchanges that food propitiates here, and in the markets where these recordings were made. These expressions and exchanges acted as vibrant and agitating forces that contested quietness and stillness. Despite keeping the levels within what was previously arranged, the concert created a major stir, drawing complaints from traders and visitors. However, for another group it was a very positive experience as was manifested to me. They liked the disruption created by the performance which they felt was sorely needed. They wanted it to happen again, so it was set up over three more concerts. For Joanne, the shouting collaborator, it was a delightful exercise in which she opposed my performance with her resonating voice in back- and-forth exchanges. She was very excited about the fact that what she does every day as part of her job, for 30 minutes, became a concert
LISTEN HERE
https://davidvelez.bandcamp.com/album/the-art-of-market-shouting-concert-documentation
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