A Balloon for the Barbican：Politics of Listening in the City of London
Reenactment and reinterpretation of Davide Tidoni’s A Balloon for the Barbican: Politics of Listening in the City of London (2012)
This work is part of a study of the acoustic space/political aesthetics of Brutalist architecture in London and is based on Davide Tidoni's work "A Balloon for the Barbican: Politics of Listening in the City of London (A Balloon for the Barbican) "as a play, recreated and restored on the basis of images.
It is a re-creation and reinterpretation based on Davide Tidoni’s 2012 piece A Balloon for the Barbican: Politics of Listening in the City of London, originally presented at the Barbican Art Gallery as part of the OMA/Progress group exhibition.
Rather than simply replicating Tidoni’s experiment, the work investigates how sound shapes our perception of architectural space. By visually re-enacting the moment a balloon bursts and capturing the resonance of its echo within a Brutalist environment, this work contributes to the doctoral research by employing reenactment as a methodological approach, through which historical sound practices are reactivated to investigate contemporary spatial listening conditions.
Documentation:
Scene 1 — [Watch video]
Scene 2 — [Watch video]
In particular, the act of balloon bursting in Tidoni’s original work becomes a critical reference point for the development of the research methodology, anticipating the use of impulse response recording, where a short, percussive sound is used to reveal the acoustic characteristics of architectural space.
This methodological transition later informed the use of convolution reverb and impulse response recording throughout the doctoral research.
