Stable Illusions (sound 10’ 00’’)

Exhibited in the group show Frankensonics: new soundworks for many speakers at Audio Foundation from Thursday 13 June - Saturday 6 July 2024

Cities are palimpsestic, regenerating and collaging the landscape repeatedly. These urban landscapes bear the lingering jitters of half attempted ideas, the highs and lows of capital investment. In downtown Tāmaki, mirrored glass comes to replace Victorian, Edwardian, turn of the century remnants of the ‘central business district’.

Working with samples from documentaries, short films and television programs of the 1980s, Lily Worrall’s piece, Stable Illusions, draws on the building and rebuilding of Tāmaki in a turbulent decade for Aotearoa. Using sounds from documented and fictionalised accounts of this phenomenon, Worrall constructs a temporal snapshot of this unending process. A chorus of voices from fictional characters, poets, property investors, architects and their critics, sit alongside TV jingles, soundtracks and the music of Lily’s father, Peter Worrall.

In concert, we experience a fever dream of 1980s speculation.

Trailer for Stable Illusions