This audio work marks the final outcome of the residency project of Naomi Hettiarachchige Hubèrt during her Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee residency.

This 60-minute sound piece delves into the experience of being mentally and emotionally connected to multiple places at once, a conditioning often felt in diasporic realities. Inspired by memories of Naomi's mother’s long-distance phone calls with family overseas – calls that were less about conversation or translation and more about simply sharing presence – the work explores what it means to be physically in one place while listening to another.

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During the residency period, Naomi gathered music, audio recordings from phone conversations, old home videos and responses to a small score – all of which capture the daily motions and routines of both friends in different locations and of her own. To echo the experience of dislocation, she developed a performative methodology where the collection of ambient recordings was dispersed among multiple speakers and positioned across different rooms in her home. By wearing binaural microphones, she could remix the different recordings from the movement between and inside these spaces – physically blending and overlapping temporalities, languages and contextual sounds – into a sonic landscape with no true center. The resulting recording was used as the input for a second run, with a set-up in another house outside of The Netherlands and a final, third run back home. This mixed audio marks the final outcome of these three enactments, shifting between public and private, familiar and distant.

”[Ambiance] questions the idea of a clear distinction between the perceiver and the perceived, the subject and the object, the inside and the outside, the individual and the world. […] Sound and ambiance enable us to emphasize the 'in-between' and the 'in-the-middle', and through them a relational thought can develop.”¹

an hour
is an arbitrary number that measures
the time it takes me to wake up and leave the house
a relaxed walk of 5 km
the duration of a work-out
or dancing to a full dj set
commuting
to commute between my house and my childhood home, by car
a one-on-one session with my therapist
the moment I intuitively check my phone to realize the unexpected length of a phone call,
1/15th of the commute between my childhood home and my mothers’ childhood home, by plane
the length of a teledrama (or two)
the 8 PM national news broadcast
a frantic walk of 7 km

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¹ Jean-Paul Thibaud, “A Sonic Paradigm of Urban Ambiances?”, Journal of Sonic Studies 1, no. 1 (October 2011).

² Futura Resistenza. Longform Visions for Earminded People. Various Artists. Bandcamp. September 11, 2023.

Naomi Hettiarachchige Hubèrt (NL) is an artist and graphic designer based in Amsterdam. She’s interested in how to re-enchant, challenge and rewrite hegemonic, western belief systems that infiltrate the everyday and spill into personal and collective consciousness. Her research is often activated through storytelling, which carries voices of human and non-human entities, alternative universes and ways of inter-existing, (auto-)fiction and reappropriated signifiers that manifest into visual, textual and sonic gestures.