Dubplants

2024, bamboo, sound projectors

Co-commissioned for Sharjah Biennial and Busan Biennial     

Dub Plants is an installation that explores the historically connected kinship between radio culture and agriculture. The first iteration of the project dips into radio waves first transmitted across the Thames Estuary in 1920 in the United Kingdom, where the first live entertainment broadcast was streamed from Macroni’s telecommunications company workshop. This project looks into one of Marconi's first long distance broadcast experiments in 1924, a signal that was beamed to a ship called the Elettra, stationed at the port of Beirut. 

This technology was later pirated in 1944, when one of the earliest works of electronic music was created using radio technology to dub a trans-mutated zaar (possession) healing ceremony by the visionary composer and creative ethnomusicologist Halim El Dabh in a radio studio in Cairo. Radio waves planted new sounds and dreams for growth and healing. El Dabh’s The Expression of Zaar is one of the earliest known works of tape music or musique concrète, and thus discovered the potential of sound recordings as raw material to compose music. This installation looks like a makeshift broadcasting tower in bamboo with Marconi Sound projectors attached to it which broadcast the artist’s composition based on aforementioned histories.

Curated by Zeynep Oz
Co-curated by Philippe Pirotte and Vera Mey
Produced by Doyeon Kim
Fabricated by Jaekuk Ahn