How do you commemorate a breakup? A 50p coin? The silent chiming of bells? Fireworks along the coast? A podcast?
Since the EU referendum in 2016, this country seems to have settled into a state of somewhat permanent division. Fuelled by clickbait, haranguing headlines, pumped-up daytime radio disc jockeys, late-night talk show phone in debates, posts, tweets, a slew of divided opinions from all angles streaming into our ears and eyes, the Brexit circus consumed our dreams and our fears.
Not that it matters, but I moved to Leeds at the back end of 2017, have lived in 2 postcodes, 3 houses since, and I don’t drive. Relying on public transport for a day trip up to Wetherby or down to Ardsley might turn into a week long excursion you weren’t planning on and didn’t pack for. Leeds is big and worth exploring and, in the 2016 referendum, voted to remain in one of the country’s closest margins (49.7/50.3).
I am not politically minded, and over the last four years I’ve struggled to keep pace with the twist and turns of this historic embarrassment. No amount of special TV coverage or handy infographics have been able to put Brexit into a scale I could understand. That is until I looked at the UK’s departure from the EU in geographic terms:
– The European Union: 1.7 million square miles (28 countries)
– The United Kingdom: 96,000 square miles (100 counties)
– and Leeds: 213 square miles (33 electoral wards)
Back in January 2019, with commemorating Brexit on my mind and a monthly bus pass tattooed to my forehead, I set off on an adventure. Armed with a DIY microphone set up, I visited all 33 electoral wards of Leeds, to sites of historic and environmental importance, with the aim to explore unification in the wake of political dislocation.
TRIANGULATION BREXIT is a free podcast sound exhibition that immerses the listener at the centre of new spaces, big and small, and all 33 episodes are available to download from today (hurray!) from wherever you download your podcasts. Slip on your headphones, push in your earphones, and sink into these field recordings while you sleep, commute, ignore the loud washing machine downstairs. Tune in to the wonderful sounds of owls waking up, the tick tock of 18th century clocks, the call to afternoon prayer, train depots, quarries, swimming pools and more.
TRIANGULATION BREXIT could be used as an antidote to the media noise surrounding Brexit or perhaps as an audio holiday around Leeds. However you use the series, TRIANGULATION BREXIT is an example of an attempt to document an unstable period in politics, conceptually concerned with the whole rather than the lefts and rights, leaves and remains of this non-united kingdom.
Download now from Spotify, Soundcloud, Tune In, Google Podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher and more or instagram.com/triangulationbrexit for more info.
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