Sound Escapes: A listening session with Riar Rizaldi

23 Oct 2026
03:30pm - 05:00pm
FREE
Kaleide Theatre, 360 Swanston Street, Melbourne VIC 3000

Register

Experience Riar Rizaldi’s sonic works, exploring sound, labour, migration, memory and resistance. Followed by a post-listening conversation with Rizaldi, Pratyay Raha and Byron Dean, moderated by Shweta Kishore.

Presented alongside Riar Rizaldi’s video works at ACMI this October, Sound Escapes is a special side event featuring Rizaldi’s sonic works, 'The Right to Do Nothing 'and 'Larung', that explore sound’s capacity for contact, communication and reflection. Both works engage with migrant labouring bodies trapped within globalized economic systems; their movement controlled, their voices silenced. But sound moves. It slips under doors, through walls, past checkpoints; it travels where bodies and vision cannot. Inviting us to listen attentively, Rizaldi’s sonic fiction transforms the voiced and unvoiced sounds of labouring subjects into media that attunes us to a world of exhaustion, violence and anonymity.

'The Right to Do Nothing' follows the ghost of an Indonesian domestic worker across Hong Kong’s urban sensorium. Inhabiting an inverted extra-terrestrial realm beyond capitalist timekeeping, the ghost whispers: a sound hovering at the edge of the audible spectrum. But why whisper? What needs to stay secret? And yet what must be spoken? Combining voice, music, effects, and live field recordings made in Hong Kong during the Covid-19 pandemic, the work converses with localised audio practices and spiritual beliefs of Indonesian domestic workers, nearly all of whom are women.

Rizaldi’s sonic works restage popular audio forms – music video, radio drama – to ask urgent questions regarding the unequal regimes of speaking and listening. In doing so, they transform familiar forms into missives that carry information, memory, and acts of sonic resistance. 'The Right to Do Nothing' plays with 'Larung'; a music video featuring the funeral songs of labour lost at sea.

Riar Rizaldi will introduce the works and join sonic artist and composer Pratyay Raha and sound artist- researcher Byron Dean for a post-listening conversation, moderated by Shweta Kishore, Senior Lecturer in Screen and Media at RMIT University.

Presented by RMIT University's Re-vision Ethical Futures Moving Image Network, with the support of Multicultural Arts Victoria.

Register

Share

Related events

Now accepting 2027 First Site Gallery project proposals

28 Sep 2026 - 01 Nov 2026

Are you an RMIT student with a creative project you’d like to share? We are calling for proposals from RMIT students, who are currently enrolled in the College of Design and Social Context, to exhibit in the 2027 First Site Gallery exhibition program.

'The Voice of the Maribyrnong' by Elijah Cristiano

06 Oct 2026 - 30 Oct 2026

Elijah Cristiano combines underwater footage, archival images and sound to examine the Maribyrnong River’s colonial and industrial histories – and the ways photography has framed the river.

'Vườn lan (Orchid Garden)' by Minh-An Pham

06 Oct 2026 - 30 Oct 2026

Rooted in his mother’s favourite flower, 'Vườn lan (Orchid Garden)' revisits Minh-An Pham’s parents’ wedding photographs as a means of reflecting on their relationship, his own experiences, and memory and longing more broadly.

Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.

Learn more about our commitment to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples

Sound Escapes: A listening session with Riar Rizaldi