Versioning the City: Live Audio Essay

Versioning the City is an exploration of sound, memory, and collective listening by artist Ashley Holmes, on the occasion of Spike Island’s exhibition, Olukemi Lijadu: Feedback.

Holmes will present a hybrid-talk and live audio essay that focusses on Dub as a methodology and the ‘version’ – the remix, the edit, the riddim reused, the vocal stripped and rebuilt – as a technique for generating place-based knowledges.

Versions destabilise origin stories and challenge listeners to consider history as iterative, open, and collective. Throughout the talk, sonic fragments of records, music recordings, radio broadcasts and interviews are played and narrated, reflecting Holmes’ recent work and interests. Holmes seeks to critically engage with music and sound to investigate our social and cultural histories, forming alternative cartographies of the places that we live.

Journeying across different time-periods, geographies and genres, Versioning the City is part of a new series of talks and listening sessions by Holmes that invite people to think about our relationships to music and sound as way of knowing, gathering, and re-inscribing histories.

Following the live audio essay, Holmes will be conducting a listening session, inviting you to bring your own audio pieces based on memory and encounters.

ASHLEY HOLMES
Ashley Holmes is an artist exploring collaborative and experimental approaches to performance, publishing and broadcasting. His work critically examines the ways music and sound function as sites of knowledge production, collective memory, and political possibility. Holmes’ recent research investigates how Western norms of ownership and property shape the circulation of music, access to land, and relationships to place – situating these questions within a wider discourse around identity, coloniality, and historical, cultural and social contexts.

He has recently exhibited work and performed at V&A Museum (2025), Arts Catalyst, No Bounds Festival, We Out Here Festival (2024), Horst Arts & Music Festival (2023), Turner Contemporary (2022), Frieze London (2021) and more. Ashley is a resident on NTS Radio, where he has hosted Tough Matter, a monthly show of experimental music and sound since 2017. He has been organising listening sessions and gatherings giving space to collectively listen and hold discussion around embodied knowledges and relationships to music, sound, memory and oral histories. In 2024 he was recipient of the Serpentine’s Support Structures for Support Structures fellowship award. Ashley teaches on the BA Fine Art programme at Liverpool John Moores University where he is also currently completing an MA in Fine Art.