30–31 July 2025
Wednesday 30 July 2025
Work Shop 1, LJ Works, Loughborough Junction
Banging a tava at 6pm London time
Whereas political ephemera has a different temporal scope, it was not meant to endure, and its contemporary use is different from its first production. Its original intention. [..] For these reasons ephemera is non-authoritative, and represents fragments of historical moments through different tendencies, so it needs a critical mass of comradely material and different archival strategies to make it understandable.
Rosemary Grennan on Leftovers [*]
Tomochan forwarded a call to bang pots and pans at 6pm local time, to acknowledge famine in Gaza caused by an Israeli blockade.
You put the streambox on the skateboard ramp by the fig tree outside the work shop and turned it on. Around 6, maybe later, [around 17m 38sec into the recording], with your head half down, you started walking around the streambox banging a tava with the offcut of a wooden stilt. it still has a rubber cleat on one end. holding near the cleat end you walked through where wild plants have grown on the hardcore, sown by Migle when she was
present pregnant. you were banging the tava and half thinking about the situation. listening to the recording of the transmission, you are waiting for the banging to start – what it will sound like. in the same way you do not know what it will be like to bang a pot or pan, to walk or stand, in that space. how people will react or not be there. how it will feel. you still don't know. you remember being half thinking, as if your thinking was split. and blurred. half split, half blurred, you did not have a clear sense either of your own situation or the wider situation you were alluding to, the remote situation. listening now, you are hearing engines – combustion, jet, together with sirens and sounds of works. the kinds of rough works that go on, you can say, around (t)here.
if the work is the record of the practice, and the record should not be more important than the practice (Fred Moten), this record is like a timestamp or a metro ticket. at the same time it is a way to check what it was like, back then. in that way it is extra, or it can be extra, if there are listening notes. some listening notes can give context. they can support the frail practice, the action(s). certain actions that are almost nothing need context, perhaps, they need supports. immediately in the recording they are becoming something else. listening notes can help that transposition. here comes a train, squeaking on the rails as it turns. a train you didn't notice, you think, as it comes back to you now.
waiting for a thing, you are waiting all the time for something else. you are always waiting, you can say, for something else, which you barely intuit or have no insight into at all. a plane drones over, high to mid, oscillating. very near, some dull wooden sounds, some feint steps, mechanical preparations
it starts unsteadily, more in the L channel, beating, then moving R. a plane also crosses, either here or there, either here at the top of the house, but you think it s there down by the work shop. moving off to the right. a metal ringing, neither bell like nor dull, neither singing nor muffled. a plain sound. a common sound, you can say, of beating a pot or pan. walking in a circle. coming around back to the left channel, tailing off towards the work shop, fading stop
that was it
a plane comes over
a bleep which could be a fork lift or some other alert
those sounds come back in like animals, filling the area
steps, dry steps, which could be yours, as if steps, the sounds of steps were belongings like shoes
if your sounds belong to you the way musicians perhaps claim ownership over sounds they make
a kind of speech begins which could be radio
a constant speaking telling which then stops. maybe turned off
white spaces
a high high whine like metal swinging on a hinge
voices passing R, people walking through
stop
the stop without warning, preamble, setup drops the listener into their present space
it s a quieter space
the writing space is not a really quiet space, it is not hushed
but the headphones are empty, they slightly muffle the outer sounds – not much
time takes on its less split way again
does that recording take you out towards the place of recall, the remote suffering the action calls on you to remember
you do not know
it jogs the memory
the memory of now
it s a slight jog - no more
if repeated, you wonder, if more people are involved, if it becomes more decisive, like when you say: somebody jogged me. they jogged my elbow
something seeming at once decisive, verging on nothing.
is there a picture of the work shop, covered in plants?
to show where it is
to give a sense of how it is at this season, where p has all those plants growing up strings
where the fig leaves are eaten by caterpillars
where the arches were cleared and sit empty where the atlas cinema was
how that was cleared and its energies were drawn
what is next for that, for that project
what is next
maybe the horse box Dele and ____ were talking about – the one parked outside
find out about that
where now
the action of banging a pot or a pan, an action verging on nothing, on the least meaningful intervention, has about it, because, as S might say, of its weakness – the weakness of its performance – it has potential to introduce a blur – not a decisive shift. how does that work. it evokes a remote sitatuation without fully figuring, trying to imagine or seeking to do justice to the magnitude of that reality (gap, injustice). it takes a rough approach. an approximation (Ella Finer). as if to draw a bit closer. is it careless. careless in the sense of having, taking no care. is it not insouciant. it is not easy, un troubled, un disturbed. on the other hand, it does not, in a sense: embody. it does not gather into it, into its body, a sense of trauma. it fails to do that. it does not claim that. although there can be hurts. like fault lines. it falls short, sideways, away. destituent, it tilts from the apparent centre of attention towards something half apparent around the edge. on shifting the eyes that is lost, perhaps. on re-aligning, after a while, it reappears, the way that fox was around the bus stop on tuesday night, coming and going on the edge of a planter, a gathering, crossing the road between vehicles, peeing on a bin. never still. half in dark. you all went to dragon's castle in elephant and castle after mort's trial. after the case was dismissed. you drove back from Leeds after installing the gair_wood stream. that stream later went down. you don t know why. you were waiting at the bus stop with m and s and p and m's mother, caroline. caroline tapped you on the shoulder: a fox. after that you were half aware of it coming and going. it s a big road, the walworth road, full of commotion. it quartered the hind spaces of the roadway, never stopping. it was a young fox, it looked like, more lean than thin. summer food
the plum trees on the allotments are weighed down. two branches broke, lying covered in shrivelling purple-black fruits. one fell on the other side of the wall. you climbed up and picked plums into trays, reaching up and pulling off handfuls. the branches rose slightly with the weight removed. the whole allotment is thick with fruit and leaves. the heat of the year has brought trees and plants into thick flower and fruiting which it seems were half waiting. acacias and chinese privets. the spring blossom was intense with abundant insects and no late hail. that swarm of bees arrived by accident. the bees stay on the alighting board, coming and going in a shiny layer. the thickness of this part of the year is felt the way a fabric. coming back from the car hire on your bike, the hornbeam across from the house was full of parrots on the ends of branches. they could be heard crunching the seeds and the road was littered with chewed tips outside that semi abandoned house
turn the dough
31/07/2025 16:33:02
Credits | References
[*] Rosemary Grennan discussing Leftovers, a political archival project by Mayday Rooms, London and 0x2620, Berlin. https://dev.leftove.rs. https://archive.leftove.rs. 'Somewhere between automation and the handmade'. Interview with Rosemary Grennan and Everyday Technology Press. Vernaculars come to matter – (re)orienting language and technology. Everyday Technology Press. https://varia.zone/etp. https://vltk.vvvvvvaria.org.
Recording of a live transmission to the Locus Sonus server on 30 July 2025 from Work Shop 1, LJ Works, Loughborough Junction, South London. Remote recording with vlc. vlc-record-2025-07-30-17h43m09s-stream_demo.mp3-.mp3.
Video recording looking out the door of WS1 on the same date.
Thanks to Tomochan for passing on the: Call for Action. Everyday at 6pm (Local Time): * Bang a pot or ban for 2-5 minutes to raise the awareness about the man-made famine in Gaza caused by Israel's illegal blockade. * Record a short video, show a Palestine Flag or Kuffiyeh and post it with the hashtag _#PotBangingForGaza. https://x.com/hashtag/PotBangingForGaza. Share it widely.