ABOUT ROMAN TAMS UMBRELLA

The record often functions as a site of resistance for both groups and individuals and has become a powerful, iconic symbol of our journies through life. In this piece I brought together the music of Roman Tam and a speech which was a call to action for the recent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. In carving the record I instantiate the tensions inherent in political struggle, between the past and present and between the ideal and the reality, between ideologies and their associated positions. We are living through a time of deep fractures and fissures between belief systems, divisiveness in communication, a constant search for consensus, open disputes over morality, the direction of humanity and a worrying redrawing of the political, cultural, and social norms. These divisions are fuelled by the digital sphere and its concomitant behavioural changes in communicative structures. This work is symbolic of these fissures, interruptions, fractured truths, interuptions, noise and a smashing of the signal. The crushing of the groove in this instance could be read as the inability of two voices to speak the same lanuage. A whole world of belief encapsulated in the speeches and sound of hope and freedom, being twisted into a broken message, that increasingly becomes more difficult to apprehend as the channel for its communication is ripped, cut and shattered. This work represents an attempt to translate some of these tensions on the taboo surface of this redolent object and its ‘cracked’ surface. The protests are an important moment in the history of democracy, a moment which should be supported by all those who value the human rights and the rights of people to hold their leaders to account.

Since orginally writing this in 2019 the Chinese government has taken control of the Hong Kong legislature, meaning that all of the pro-democracy politicians have been deposed, and The Party have taken full control of the city.