Evidence of things unseen but heard (2018) is an audiovisual collage conducted as an archaeological survey into the music scene of the city of Bristol, specifically plotting: “The Bristol Sound”. The beginning is the neighbourhood of St. Paul’s in Bristol, or perhaps it is the sugar plantations of the Caribbean that led to the wealth of Bristol through centuries of trade of enslaved Africans, or somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which operates as the connecting volume between these geographies and times. The predominately Caribbean community of St. Paul’s protested in April 1980 against the brutality of the police forces in particular and against the racist institutions and conditions of economic oppression of Margaret Thatcher’s government more broadly. The centuries of colonial violence echo back, entangled with the nights of unrest resulting from a complex security apparatus activated through computerised police surveillance and newly implemented Stop and Search laws across Bristol, and other parts of England.
This audiovisual collage argues that such measures of social control used against the St. Paul’s community were first developed on the slave plantation in the Caribbean. Rippling and reverberating through time are the sonic acts that unleashed rhythms of defiance, against the Police/Plantation state. The Reggae Sound System is imagined as an alternative public sphere with Dub as its technological invention, suggesting, as Fred Moten has described, that “Sound gives us back the visuality that ocularcentrism had repressed.”
