What we Learn When You’re Not Listening
Whitechapel Gallery
2007
This project was developed over the course of a year residency at the Whitechapel Gallery and in collaboration with Brampton Manor Secondary School.
The work takes as its starting point the valuable social structure that school offers in terms of putting together so many people with their peers within the same environment and looks specifically at the value of discussion time between students, in the playground, communal spaces of the school and when supposedly ‘not concentrating’ in lessons.
To make this work all 1500 students were asked to write a piece of advice that they would give to another student. Smith then set up a sound recording studio in the school and students were invited, two at a time, to discuss one of the pieces of advice offered by a fellow student. These conversations were recorded and layered to form a sound work that echoes the typical noise of a school corridor or playground with occasionally audible snippets of the incredibly deep and thought provoking conversations that are its substance.
Having created the sound work Smith then worked with a smaller number of students elected by the student body to narrow down the pieces of advice offered by the whole school into an ethos or statement which was printed as postcards and circulated to every student.
Smith then worked with the students to establish where in the school each of the phrases within the ethos most applied and together they created and installed plaques in the playground, at the entrance to the main building, on the school gates, in a corridor regularly vandalized and in a corridor where bullying was known to take place, to most effectively communicate their message.
