My research investigates site-specific sound installation practice by way of two public urban sound projects, created for the Auckland City Council in Tamaki Makarau / Auckland. Contrary to the typically dominant visual aspects of public art, in these works I explore the capacity of the acoustic domain to territorialise and engender space. The works undertaken in this research explore the use of the chant particularly as a key structuring device in the development of acoustic space. I look to find voices and tell stories with sounds shaped in response to the existing soundscape, that resonate with genealogies centred in site and place. These “voice”/ place relations suggest, beyond the usual linear emphasis of genealogy, the value of resonance, echo, and sounding in such relations. Through disruption opening up the possibility of a “becoming”, the installations seek to deterritorialise, reverberating out into the wider world and through time. Generally, I have framed these explorations within what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari refer to as a “geophilosophy” as a way of recognizing the complex territorial constituents of thought itself. Whakapapa is engaged with here to deepen and nuance, an understanding of geophilosophy, one that aims to better understand the complex forces binding cultures to place.
