Calls For Cages

At the zoological and botanical gardens in Hong Kong, sitting in the darkness before the break of dawn I recorded the morning songs of Siamang, Buff Cheeked Gibbons, and many other primates.

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As I closed my eyes, listening to the achingly beautiful glissandos, I was transported far from the hustle and bustle and to the arboreal forests of Southeast Asia. When I listened back to the recording I was struck by how different the reality was from my own internal imagination. Instead of the expansive, inspiring sound that I thought I’d heard, the recorded audio was constrained, full of background traffic noise, passing airplanes, and the cold metallic clank of cages.

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Calls for Cages critically examines the practice of displaying animals in cages for human pleasure. It places the calls and songs of primates within an imagined natural landscape, before stripping that sound of its environmental context and brutally reshaping it to fit with a new, human imposed reality. In the closing section, we are finally presented with the original, unedited audio of the city waking up, and the animal calls slowly diminishing to silence.

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