“The mission is all about bonding with the community,” says Suzuki, “with an inviting, natural presence and quality acoustics.” Although, as Suzuki mentions, the exhibit is in a very central, and very busy part of London, behind Oxford Street and Bond Street, there is also a strong local community of residents alongside the visitors and shoppers – “I would like to create a moment that potentially merges all the people there,” claims the artist. “I needed to consider sound, safety and narrative,” he continues. “I enjoyed the process of developing these together, of getting to know the community through working with Grosvenor.”
Suzuki is very grateful for the help of Anne-Laure Pingreoun from Alter-Projects and the work of Gabriel Vergara from Pentagram as well as the team from Grosvenor.
Hopefully, installations like Suzuki’s will encourage us to go outside and reconnect with the environment and the city after a time where many are feeling a little anxious to mix with our fellow city dwellers.
The installation is located in Brown Hart Gardens, North Mayfair and is free to visit. And a parallel digital experience will launch during the London Design Festival in September. You can share your Sonic Blooms at #SonicBloomMayfair.
Through a website, participants’ voice recordings are transformed into flower animations which are randomly planted on a map of Mayfair. This means that we can record our voices at the physical installation as well as online and then invite others to collaborate on our unique Sonic Bloom flower design. Suzuki aimed to capture three audible themes; people, nature and the surrounding environment. Sonic Bloom seeks to thereby make human interactions easier in spaces where they don’t usually occur by inviting the public to engage with their surrounding environment.