Listen to Open Your Palm, Feel the Dust Settling There – a new three-part audio work by artist and Savage Messiah author Laura Grace Ford, generated by psychogeographic walks – drifts – through the Latimer Road, Hammersmith and White City areas of West London.
Combining spoken text and sound collage, Open Your Palm is an audio work responding to the psychic and emotional contours of the city. Made from field recordings and fragments of found music, the spectral sectors of the city permeate its three episodes. The channelling of voices based on real encounters allows for an intersubjective relationship with the terrain, an approach to sound and text as a form of psychic ventriloquy.
Across three episodes, Ford reconnects with the counter-narratives of Latimer Road by walking with a personal network of squatters, activists and soundsystems, as well as friends made during a decade of public sector work in the area. In 2005, Ford captured the affective currents of the Latimer Road area in her zine Savage Messiah where she connected with flashpoints of counter-cultural intensity. The new work is both a lament and the channelling of an incendiary pulse, it is a retracing of steps, a map of warnings left unheeded.
