Manifesta 7: Tantalum Memorial - Residue

Régine Debatty is just back from Just back from Manifesta, the seventh edition of a touring art biennale held in Trentino, Italy. She writes up an exhibit related to cell phones on her blog we-make-money-not-art.com.

Tantalum Memorial - Residue, by England-based Graham Harwood, Richard Wright, and Matsuko Yokokoji, is a telephony-based memorial to the people who have died as a result of the tantalum wars in the Congo.

The installation below is constructed out of an old electro-mechanical 1938 Strowger telephone exchange, discovered amongst the remains of the Alumix factory.

The switches are reanimated by tracking the phone calls from Telephone Trottoire - a social telephony network designed by the artists in collaboration with the Congolese radio program Nostalgie Ya Mboka in London. The TT network calls Congolese listeners, plays them a phone message and invites them to record a comment and pass it on to a friend by entering their phone number.

This builds on the traditional Congolese practice of "radio trottoire" or "pavement radio", the passing around of news and gossip on street corners in order to avoid state censorship."

emily | 8:53 AM | SMS and the Arts |
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