Issue 2 – Preview #9: Katie Rochow’s Aotearoa: picturing the lyrics of the land

Music-making in the city constitutes and is constituted by a plurality of urban rhythms including the movement of people between different locations, regular temporal patterns of events, activities, experiences and practices as well as energies, objects, flora and fauna, which shape the music-maker’s mundane ‘pathways’ through the city. I used photo-elicitation as a way of capturing, understanding and interpreting the multiple rhythms that shape the musicians’ everyday life in Wellington. The participant generated photographs captured different people, objects, places, events, interactions, fluxes and flows around the city. Besides the concrete and visible, the images elicit the non-verbal, non-cognitive, affective rhythms, which direct and propel the pulse and life of urban spaces without actually being visible. As such, photo-elicitation serves as a fruitful tool for recognising the interwovenness of socialities, atmospheres, objects, texts and images in people’s everyday lives and in this way affords opportunities for attending to the concrete, physical reality of urban spaces as well as other less tangible, less readily apparent but no less significant affective aspects that shape musical activity in the city.

Read Katie’s full piece HERE