‘Relay’ is a series of site-responsive and iterative sonic performances conceived by Hannan Jones and Samir Kennedy. Employing movement, sound, sampling and improvisation to construct a sonic environmental container which interrogates the complexities of the artists’ shared Algerian-British identities; testing live ways in which to articulate and embody multiplicity and intersecting psychological states.

The work interrogates the infinite flux and construction of fragmented identities and the dissolution of self through sampling collected personal sonic archives, in an attempt to bridge cultural chasms and to speak to a lingering sense that our bodies carry histories that are intangible in theory but become tangible through our very existence. Situating sound and movement as vectors for lived understanding whilst shaping a persistence of anticipation of a future already felt.

Through live sound composition and field recordings, Jones and Kennedy map temporal, sonic and geographical space, connecting points between France, UK, Algeria and Australia unearthing shared histories that extend beyond the present - clawing at the past and projecting futures to settle in.

The two work with analogue synthesis and sampling - specifically using an elongated reel-to-reel tape loop that is stretched through the space - Jones and Kennedy build a multilayered soundscape that rhythmically returns, drops out and repeats on itself. Using contact microphones, they sample sounds made by the body in motion. In recurrent movements, and choreographic abstraction, Kennedy builds bodily narratives and an emotional progression that reaches towards exhaustion. Together, the pair develop a cyclical exchange between sound and choreography, body and machine, relaying back and forth within sonic space.

Developed during residencies at Triangle-Asterides, Wysing Arts Centre and GMEM with the support of The Common Guild in Glasgow, ‘Relay’ articulates a sense of a constantly searching present: infinitely shifting, endlessly adrift and always propelling forwards. The performance tests the ways in which liveness can reveal thresholds of both vulnerability and resistance through a durational approach to liveness.

Images:
1 + 3 Relay, Marseille, Samir Kennedy and Hannan Jones, 2025
2 + 4 Assembly, Somerset House, London, 2026 by Anne Tetzlaff
5 + 6 Relay, The Common Guild, 2025, by Alan Dimmick