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.
