A collective listening session for Spike Island Associates exploring sound, memory, and place by artist Ashley Holmes.

Following Holmes’ live audio essay, this collective listening workshop invites participants into a space where each contribution becomes another version – another take – within the unfolding conversation of the afternoon.

Participants are invited to draw on their own personal archives and to bring a track or sound recording connected to their own memories, inheritances, or sense of place – records, voice notes, radio clips, field recordings, tracks that have travelled with them. The session treats listening not as passive consumption, but as an embodied, relational, and historically situated practice.

Together, we will explore listening as a form of gathering, attentive to how sound moves through bodies, across generations, and within communities. The session draws on Dub as a methodology, foregrounding versions, echoes, and re-contextualisations to invite different modes of engagement.

How does a recording change when heard in a new room, with new people? How does something personal resonate differently when it’s in dialogue with sounds that someone else brings with them? We will find ways to document the discussion using maps of Bristol. Versioning the City questions how listening together can create and become a temporary, collaborative archive shaped by everyone in the room.

Prompts:
These prompts are designed to be clear, spacious, and non-reductive so that you can bring something without feeling you have to ‘represent’ anything.

You are encouraged, but not required, to share a piece of sound during the session. If you do not want to share any sound, then you are encouraged to join the conversation.

Bring one piece of sound that:

1. Travels with you — a track or recording that has moved across places or moments in your life.
2. Holds a memory — personal, familial, communal, or something felt in the body.
3. Embodies a Version — a remix, edit, cover, radio rip, WhatsApp voice note (or anything that exists as a variation).
4. Marks an encounter — something you heard with others, or something that changed when listened to again in a different setting.
5. Feels part of a lineage — musical, cultural, diasporic, or otherwise.

Technical info: Participants will have a maximum of 5minutes to share their audio clip(s). Your audio should be formatted as an MP3 or WAV file, and brought on a USB or laptop.