Rebecca Lennon
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Rebecca Lennon's MPhil/PhD Art research project
ESTATE CHOIR: SPECULATIVE ANARCHITECTURES OF VOICE & POLYPHONIC WORLDBUILDING
This practice-based PhD explores the potential of collective voice as speculative anarchitecture. Working with video and sonic essay, drawing, scoring, textile banners and blankets, and a collaborative, improvised spatial choir recorded inside ten houses on a housing estate in North London, the project examines how collective vocal practices move with and against architectural structures. It asks how voices redistribute agency, redraw social and spatial connections, and enable forms of world-building that resist institutional control.
The research draws parallels between Hildegard von Bingen’s medieval morality play and vocal composition Ordo Virtutum (1151), pirate radio practices on UK council estates in the 1990s (Singh Brah, 2021) and vocal expression in protest movements such as Greenham Common’s Keening action (1982). Across these contexts, collective voice is understood as a force capable of redrawing architectural and social boundaries—becoming anarchic, anarchitectural—and creating what Ella Finer describes as ‘a politics of resonance’1.
Drawing on neuroscientific research into collective vocalisation, including studies demonstrating how choirs synchronise heart rates and bodily rhythms to increase group solidarity (Vickhoff et al., 2013), the project situates collective voice as a physiological and political force, with potential for both dissonance and harmony.
From this position, it traces herstories of polyphony, antiphony, choirs, and chants - architecturally, and situationally, asking what purposes these vocal practices have served, what kinds of worlds they have built, and how they have acted upon and through bodies.
Borrowing the term anarchitecture from Gordon Matta-Clark and the Anarchitecture group, and herstorical practices of horizontal, communal architecture, the project reframes collective voice as speculative anarchitecture: a material and relational force that builds and unbuilds worlds, resists hegemonic spatial orders, and imagines alternative forms of communality beyond the limits of sanctioned architecture.
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