A sound walk and installation made in a tunnel for ‘Watch This Space’ #4WCoP23 September 2023 using graffiti by North Edinburgh artists and local history. Listen here.
Location
‘Is There a Place for REVOlution? or Peace and Biscuits’ is a site-specific Sound Walk and Art Installation on the Chancelot cycle path under Ferry Road in Edinburgh. It is on Google Maps and the location using What3Words is ///fallen.reach.bottle
You can use your phone to activate the QR code and listen while you walk through the tunnel. You can also listen at home (without the full effect).
Understanding the text
The text of this Sound Walk uses other people’s sprayed graffiti words, so it sometimes sounds like nonsense. In it, I am playing with the found text, trying to make sense of it. Sometimes I read the words (like ABDO or REVO) from left to right (as English) and sometimes from right to left (as Arabic), highlighting the effort we often have to make to understand each other, and how important it is that we do. Because this is a sort of creative prose or poetry, I also make up my own words to fit in with the letters I find.
Sound Walk topics include:
- Local history
- Communication between us (reading and language)
- How to keep yourself going when everything seems bleak
- How the Red Line has been used in activism, in this and other countries
- The capitalist system and whether it helps us
- Slowing down and noticing nature; using wall- or street-wisdom
Site-specific Art Installation
You will find hand stitched pennants looped on a red line on one side of the tunnel. The string of triangular flags are hanging from old metal hooks which were originally used for cable and wires when this cycle path (or greenway) was a railway. The images and found text are from the walls and surfaces around North Edinburgh.
“AET REY NOOD Do you recognise this language? DAERB REY TAE. Can an internet app translate it? It’s ABout DOing / Or Don’t Be And (face the consequences).” This is text from the new Sound Walk. For clues, see the images below.
I’m playing with words, making my own acronyms which are inspired by the found text. For example, ABDO (reading from left to right and back again from right to left etc) becomes: “And Between Doing Or Don’t Be. Anyway, By Doing Otherwise, Deciding to Be And Bide, Doesn’t Our Doing Become……A Beautiful Door Opening. Or Don’t Butterflies Ascend?” Am I speaking in riddles? I hope I haven’t lost you.
Using found words / graffiti that spoke to me
| Unless you people see signs and wonders you will never believe |
| 80% of ocean life is dead |
| Many |
| Deaths |
| Lives Matter |
| Unfuck the system |
| Fight |
| REVOlution, Revolt, Revoke |
In this soundwalk, there’s some local history, activism and suggestions for when you are in a dark tunnel and cannot see the light at the end, the way out. There’s a film here on Vimeo that gives you a (silent) idea of the walk.
“I often use Street Wisdom if I need to get an insight on a situation or a problem. Once I’m tuned up, I’II hold the issue and just walk with that in mind and body, and see what happens. (It’s basically a shorthand way of doing the Quest: “Streets, show me some options with all this!”) Something often, if not I j. The other day I was full of different stresses, and the streets shared with me all kinds of patterns that seemed interconnected. I interpreted that insight as “Everything’s connected” (it’s nice to reduce the insight to 2 or 3 words). And that really helped!
Philip Cowell from Street Wisdom
With MANY thanks to Alba Bersolí (film maker ‘El día que volaron la montaña’ (When the Mountain Rumbles shown at the Catalan Film Festival in Edinburgh 2023 on Instagram @albabresolí ) for lending me her laptop and teaching me some Premiere Pro, going above and beyond to support me, and being an all-round wonderful woman.
New pennants (August 2025)
Notes
‘Your Wish is my Command’ is a graphic novel by Deena Mohamed reviewed here in the Guardian newspaper. There is a charcter called Abdo in it. ABDO is a word graffitied on the wall of the Ferry Road tunnel on the Chancelot Path where my Sound Walk is located.
Walking without a donkey 