To accompany Serpentine's 2022 Radio Ballads exhibition, we commissioned sound objects that could hold and share the project's collaborative processes, communicate care through sound, and invite listeners into the emotional world of Radio Ballads.

Referencing the methods used in the original BBC Radio Ballads, audio producer Nada Smiljanic made eight sound objects by stitching, layering and weaving together sound and music that had been captured by the Radio Ballads team throughout three years of collaborations, conversations and performances. 

These creative tracks are permanently available on Serpentine’s free Bloomberg Connects app, alongside an introduction from the Civic team and an interview between Amal Khalaf, Civic Curator, Serpentine, and Marijke Steedman, founder of New Town Culture.

Connecting

Processing

Supporting

Voicing

Embodying

Listening

An Invitation to Pause

Dreaming

AN ECLIPSE

HEAVEN (LUXURY = DEATH), read by Colin Self, is a chapter from Nemesis's likely-never-to-be-released architectural essay "SPACE". 

The audio piece is about Heaven as the sum total of assumptions about luxury, comfort, predictability and risk. (Not the Judeo-Christian “place.”) We contend that true luxury is the freedom from all desire, which is only possible when you’re already dead. For this reason: LUXURY = DEATH. (This thinking is drawn from our ongoing writing project on the real and imaginary architectural spaces in our research, which might culminate in the first Nemesis book, “SPACE”). 

Originally released as part of the Architecture Effects show at the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2018.

HEAVEN (LUXURY = DEATH)

Be kinder to yourself.

Lyrics:

I have to bury you cos you’re killing me
Too high a price just for some memories
Could take it all and put in melodies
Or maybe not cos it go worry me

Written & Performed: EDWVN
Produced & Arranged: EDWVN

repression

Kae Sun is the musical project of Ghanaian-born, Montreal-based singer-songwriter and artist Kwaku Darko-Mensah Jnr.

AN ECLIPSE

Kae Sun

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