held (in)---tension is an interactive audio installation using the city's physical structure as an opportunity for embodied play. Through collaborative, textural noise-making participants are invited to create vibrations using their body, breath, and voice.
Our bodies carry more than they can comfortably hold. Grief, fear, uncertainty, and the pressures to be productive accumulates in our muscles, constricts our breath, and forces us to comply with the demands of late-stage capitalism at the expense of rest. held (in)---tension is an interactive audio installation that invites participants to explore play, as a form of collective care and resistance.
Installed in the urban landscape of Kjipuktuk, held (in)---tension inhabits a vacant commercial space, reimagining it as a location for collaborative sound-making. Participants are encouraged to experiment with touch, movement, breath, and voice, discovering how the structures around us can become sites for shared listening, expression, and embodied play.
By stroking, rubbing, tapping, squishing, beating, squeaking, slapping, squawking, grinding, breathing, and vocalizing, participants generate a textured, sonic environment together. These vibrations travel through the installation and into the surrounding city, transforming a familiar landscape through collective resonance and action.
In a culture that often dismisses play as frivolous, held (in)---tension proposes it as a restorative practice of connection. Through curiosity, improvisation, and collaborative sound-making, the installation encourages participants to slow down, soften into their bodies, sharpen their senses, and reconnect with the tactile sensory experience of play; touching, listening, experimenting and responding to one another, purely for the joy.
