Louis Henderson is a filmmaker and writer who experiments with different ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Since 2017, Henderson has been working within the artist group The Living and the Dead Ensemble. Based between Haiti and France, they focus on theatre, song, slam, poetry and cinema, their first feature film Ouvertures was awarded a FIPRESCI special mention at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival 2020. His work has been shown in various international film festivals, art museums and biennials, and is distributed by LUX, Video Data Bank and Phantom. He lives and works in Paris and Berlin.
By disjointing acts of listening from the ear and its particular arrangement of time, Sonic Continuum proposes a shift from representation to expression and asks: can sound restitute failures to listen? How might we listen to time affectively? What auditory imaginaries and possible futures can listening unfold?
In this listening-session, artist and filmmaker Louis Henderson discusses four records produced in industrial cities in the UK during the years of Margaret Thatcher’s reign. Proposing music as a particularly fertile site of developing solidarity and resistance to the violence of Thatcher’s neoliberal and racist police state, the essay listens out for the influence of the techniques of echo and delay, connecting the struggles of migrant workers from the Caribbean and the British miners and factory workers.