At Artpace, Roberts has created a sound installation work that extends the gallery space into the city. Roberts’ process began by conducting a number of interviews with people, recording their stories and perspectives on historical and personal monuments. These interviews form a fragmented soundtrack, which creates a complex space built from diverse voices and locations.
The project investigates some of the desires that are at play when we identify strongly with an image or an event that takes place within and beyond our personal experience. About the project, the artist comments, “Events are understood in the present through linear narrative time, such time can be identified as ‘history’—the categorization of the past. This categorization is a consequence of the need for value and instruments. The ways in which we link places together and transform them into personal narratives, however, play a subversive role in undermining dominant interpretations of space. These narratives are a means of ‘disclosure’ between the narrator and the place, in which the individual’s identification with the place reveals a secret while creating spaces. In the installation, this temporality of language creates the time for physical actions in which individuals actually realize themselves.”
