Stone Tape

ABOVE: excerpts of on-site documentation of the installation as installed at the Dimitri Hanna house on Disraeli 13 St, the current headquarters of the Israeli Psychoanalytical Society.

Stone Tape is a site specific, documentary sound installation.

The piece consists of a network of sound wires, suspended from the ceiling, running along the walls, looping around different rooms in the house, but never connecting to a speaker – so the sound they carry remains inaudible to the naked ear.

Visitors to the site receive handheld electromagnetic listening devices, similar to those used to tap phone lines, or make “ghost recordings” (EMF). Using these devices, the visitors can point their antennas at the wires and listen to the sounds they carry, that get louder the closer the visitor is to the wire. The system thus functions almost like an “analog Augmented Reality” environment, with sounds having clear position and directionality in the space.

The wires intersect in a central space, providing a range of overlapping voices and soundscapes, and split up from there into various rooms, in each of which two or more voices radiate from specific architectural features or objects that the wires frame. Bigger loops along the ceilings serve as immersive soundscapes that the visitors may move within, whereas the wires and the object they connect to serve as specific sonic focal points in each space.

In this instance of the project, the listener hears material recorded in conversations and interviews that took place in and around a house in Jerusalem’s Talbiyah neighborhood, which for the past 50+ years has been the home of the Israeli Psychoanalytical Society, one of the first in the world. The house was originally built by Dimitri Hanna, a Palestinian bureaucrat forced to flee along with many others in the war of 1948, with the house being seized as so-called “abandoned property” by the newly formed Israeli state. A key trigger for the current project is a recent letter written by Hanna’s London-based granddaughter, addressed to the house’s current inhabitants. In the letter, she recounts her family’s connection to the house and asks them to describe daily life, and to send her something. Several psychoanalysts working in the house as well as neighbors and other people connected to the house were all interviewed, and the conversations inevitably turned up themes of loss, memory, trauma and repression.