One squally, middling afternoon, I take a train from my home in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington up the Kāpiti coast in an attempt to recreate the conditions in which a viewer might have originally encountered the Palestinian artist Inas Halabi’s sound work Hopscotch (the Centre of the Sun’s Radiance). But ‘viewer’ is something of a misnomer.
Commissioned in 2021 for Endless Express — a temporary ‘art trail’ sited along the length of the railway line between Ostend and Eupen, Belgium — in this initial iteration, Hopscotch was experienced via a scannable QR code, found on a poster in a waiting room at Brussel-Centraal station. From there, its multi-chapter soundscape begins, streaming through individual phones, laptops and headphones in an endless loop, with no visual component at all. Composed of ambient field recordings, oral testimonies, snippets of music and radio broadcasts, Hopscotch tracks locations across two continents, Africa and Europe, to explore how entangled histories of labour and extraction, tied to the development of colonial-era railways, are embedded in the contemporary landscape. Depending on the point at which the connection is made, its sonic journey takes listeners to post-industrial Wallonia — the first fully industrialised area in continental Europe and one-time pillar of the Belgian economy, now a region with one of the country’s highest unemployment rates — and to the vast landscapes and cities of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): Lubumbashi, Likasi, Kambove, Kisangani. Or you might find yourself, as I did, gazing out at patient seascapes as the train hugged the cliff along the Paekākāriki escarpment, drifting towards Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Working with local sound recordists and translators, Halabi traces the extraction and transport of uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine in the DRC to a now-defunct refinery in Olen, Belgium. Uranium was discovered at Shinkolobwe in 1915, and continued to be transported by train and boat to Belgium for over fifty years, where it was processed at the Olen refinery. This uranium was eventually used to create the first atomic bombs. Both the mine and refinery have their roots in the operations of Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK), a Belgian mining conglomerate that controlled and operated the (primarily copper, then uranium) mining industry across the Congolese province of Katanga between 1906 and 1966. The company was headquartered in both Brussels and Lubumbashi (then known as Léopoldville); its contemporary successors are a state-controlled entity in the DRC, Gecamines (Générale des Carrières et des Mines, from 1971) and the European iteration of the corporation, now known as Umicore (rebranded in 2001). Umicore closed its Olen factory in 1970, burying up to 500,000 square metres of radioactive waste in the red soil surrounding the site.[1]
Hopscotch (the Centre of the Sun’s Radiance) does not follow a linear structure, instead borrowing its title and form from the children’s playground game, as well as the novel of the same name by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Cortázar’s book instructs its readers on an alternative chapter hierarchy, one that infinitely repeats itself, producing, in the words of its English translator Gregory Rabassa, ‘a broken record effect, where the needle keeps jumping back and repeating and the song never ends’.[2] Halabi’s own Hopscotch shifts between several chapters, whose beginnings and endings are never the same, journeying across language, land and interlocutor to examine how the past continues to inflect the present. In its attention to non-linear and non-visual modes of representation, the work is an attempt to upend the unerring teleology of the railway’s cartographic desires. As Halabi describes:
The industrial revolution in Belgium and elsewhere birthed the electrical telegraph, which initially replaced the sun as a measuring device. Rather than following the natural cycles of time, the train produced a machinelike cycle of synchronised time. And in its turn, that produced the society of labour which we know today: capitalism. The trains’ reliability, regularity and predictability engraved structure into the geography and psychology of the surrounding landscape and its community.[3]
The second part of the title is taken from the inaugural speech made by the DRC’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, in June 1960, in which he vowed to make ‘the Congo the centre of the sun’s radiance for all of Africa’, and to ‘keep watch over the lands of our country so that they truly profit her children’.[4] The ‘final’ chapter of Hopscotch returns to this historical moment, as it captures the sounds of the vibrant city of Lubumbashi celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of its independence from Belgium on 30 June 2020. A recording of Lumumba’s speech plays in a clip of a radio program, which also hints at the nefarious intervention by Western powers in Lumumba’s assassination on 17 January 1961. Later, Gulda (Ghislain el Magambo), one of the Congolese sound recordists with whom Halabi worked, sings along to ‘Indépendence Cha Cha’ — the song by Le Grand Kallé of L’African Jazz most synonymous with independence.
The version of Hopscotch now in circulation takes the form of a video installation or projection, and transcribes what we hear — rather than what we see — into white text subtitles on a black background, which plays in a loop of around two hours. The motivation for this shift was primarily to broaden the work’s accessibility, enabling the translation of its four languages (Flemish, Swahili, French and English) for international audiences. Yet Halabi’s texts register a level of incidental, intimate detail that would be otherwise imperceptible, giving textual clues as to what is only suggested sonically: ‘Someone wearing slippers is walking across the room’; ‘soft plastic like sounds of something being blown away’; ‘a child giggling playfully from a distance’. Often, this brief description swiftly gives way to a black screen, immersing the viewer in the haptic quality of the sound, as well as suggesting the ways in which its affect interacts with bodies out of frame. Again, the usual vocabulary of spectatorship — of seeing, viewing, witnessing — fails in its ocularcentrism. In emphasising the abnegation of a visual mode of representation, Halabi employs opacity and omission as strategic tools — following the Martiniquan writer and poet Édouard Glissant’s call for opacity as the refusal to be knowable, understood and rendered transparent by a dominant Western order.[5] For Glissant, opacity is the vocabulary of the fragment, the glimpse, or the partial frame. But importantly, ‘the opaque is not the obscure’.[6]
Through its transcription of sound into text, Hopscotch is also attuned to the dynamics of what pioneering musician and composer Pauline Oliveros called ‘deep listening’ — a practice of listening as activism.[7] A form of sonic meditation, it was developed in response to the anti-war movements of the 1960s. Oliveros was interested in the difference between hearing and listening: as she put it, ‘Hearing represents the primary sense organ — hearing happens involuntarily. Listening is a voluntary process that through training and experience produces culture. All cultures develop through ways of listening.’ Oliveros continues:
Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, or one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds.[8]
Rooted in the power of sound to construct alternative narratives, Hopscotch (The Centre of the Sun’s Radiance) is its own call to deep listening, to imagine listening beyond the edges of individual consciousness. I close my eyes, feeling the thrum of the shuddering train through my spine. Listening this way, I hear: the hum of overlapping voices and songs, the ongoing convergence of the political, technological and economic forces that still mark these formerly colonised territories by extractivist profiteering, and the rhythmic sounds of exploited human labour that echo in the collective memories of their inhabitants.
[1]For more information, see excerpts of Inas Halabi’s research at https://hopscotch.film/
[2] Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents. A Memoir. New Directions, New York, 2005, p. 52.
[3]Inas Halabi, interview with Sydney van Nieuwaal, Subbaculcha, 2 June 2023, https://subbacultcha.nl/2023/06/02/an-interview-with-inas-halabi/ (accessed 9 August 2024).
[4]Inas Halabi, interview with Sydney van Nieuwaal, Subbaculcha, 2 June 2023, https://subbacultcha.nl/2023/06/02/an-interview-with-inas-halabi/ (accessed 9 August 2024).
[5]Recalling his claim to the right of opacity at a university congress in Mexico in 1969, Glissant states: ‘There’s a basic injustice in the worldwide spread of the transparency and the projection of Western thought. Why must we evaluate people on the scale of the transparency of ideas proposed by the West? … As far as I’m concerned, a person has the right to be opaque’ (Édouard Glissant quoted in Manthia Diawara (director), Un monde en relation (One World in Relation), 2009, https://www.frieze.com/article/opazität, accessed 22 October 2024).
[6] Édouard Glissant, ‘For Opacity’, Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 1997, p. 191.
[7]See Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. iUniverse, Lincoln, NE, 2005.
[8]Pauline Oliveros, ‘Quantum Listening: From Practice to Theory (To Practice Practice)’, 1999, https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/736945/19af465bc3fcf3c8d5249713cd586b28.pdf.
Jess Clifford is a critic and curator based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington, Aotearoa, where she is the editor for CIRCUIT Artist Moving Image. Recent curatorial projects include: Inas Halabi: The Centre Does Not Hold, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, 2024; I’m so into you, The Physics Room, 2024; and To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, 2023.