DOI: 10.71796/wits-figshare.30421822
title: The poetry of small things

description: The Poetry of Small Things (2024) is part of an ongoing series of sound-based artistic interventions investigating the relationship between listening, place, and urban life. Presented at the Hietsu Pavilion and Lapinlahti Old Mental Hospital in Helsinki, the project consisted of a multi-sited ambient sound installation, a participatory soundwalk, and a series of prompted writing exercises. Conceived by the Johannesburg-based collective PlayGroup (Barend Engelbrecht, Jill Richards, and Jurgen Meekel), the work brought recordings from Johannesburg’s urban soundscape into resonance with Helsinki’s public spaces. The project unfolded as an ephemeral yet affectively charged sonic exchange between two cities, asking how background sound, memory, and the sensory fabric of everyday life shape our understanding of space and self. Problem Statement and Key Research Question: The project addresses the underexamined role of ambient and background sound in shaping urban experience. In contemporary urban design and cultural theory, attention is often given to visual and spatial form, while the auditory dimension of the city remains undertheorised. The Poetry of Small Things asks: how do small, often unnoticed sonic details influence our perception of place? What happens when the local soundscape of one city is transplanted into another—can it disrupt, augment, or reveal latent urban dynamics? Furthermore, the project interrogates how such sonic displacements challenge conventional expectations about site-specificity, auditory memory, and cultural context. In this way, the project raises a broader question: can listening to what is usually ignored help us attune to subtle modes of coexistence in unfamiliar environments?Primary Aim: The primary aim of the project is to provoke new ways of listening to the city by amplifying the overlooked, ephemeral, and ambient. The installation seeks to reframe the sonic environment not as background, but as a medium through which urban sociality and temporality become audible. Through translocating Johannesburg’s ambient sounds into Helsinki’s public spaces, the work aspires to create a dissonant-yet-resonant dialogue between urban contexts, challenging audiences to reconsider how sound shapes their engagement with space, history, and everyday movement.Methodology and Conceptual Framework: The project is grounded in artistic research methodologies and draws from sound studies, urban geography, and critical cartography. Aural mapping techniques were used to record and curate fragments of Johannesburg’s soundscape—street noise, distant conversations, birdsong, and infrastructural rhythms—which were then composed into looping sound sequences. These recordings were broadcast through a dispersed set of speakers located across multiple semi-public zones: an open terrace at Hietsu Pavilion, the repurposed cafeteria at the Lapinlahti mental hospital, and a combined spatial sonification in the hospital’s exhibition halls. The spatial arrangement of the installation allowed sounds to bleed unpredictably into their environment, creating moments of overlap, interruption, or resonance with the surrounding activity.In parallel with the installation, a guided soundwalk invited participants to attend to the ambient sounds of their immediate surroundings. Conceptually, the project draws from theories of the “infra-ordinary” (Perec), non-representational theory, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “listening” as an act of relational openness. Rather than presenting a coherent narrative or sonic identity, the project embraces fragmentation, layering, and subtlety as means of engaging the city as a dynamic field of sensory relations. Contribution to new knowledge: The Poetry of Small Things in Helsinki contributes to the growing field of sonic urbanism by foregrounding ambient sound as a critical and creative register for understanding the city. It demonstrates how trans local auditory interventions can destabilise normative experiences of space and foster new modes of urban attention. By shifting focus to the marginal, the residual, and the easily forgotten, the work provides a methodological model for exploring the politics of the background. The installation also offers a speculative approach to auditory cartography, one that resists totalising representations in favour of fragmented, lived, and affectively rich mappings of place.Moreover, by integrating participatory and interdisciplinary methods—including sound walking, environmental broadcasting, and collaborative writing—the project expands the toolkit for sonic-based artistic research. In its invitation to reflect on the minor elements of daily life, The Poetry of Small Things advocates for listening as a form of situated knowledge, care, and spatial awareness.