'Dead air': The acoustic of war and peace - creative interpretations of the sounds of conflict and remembrance

On 11th November 2001, Jonty Semper released a two CD album, Kenotaphion, which captured the empty sounds of seventy years of Two Minute Silences recorded at the Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday ceremonies at the Cenotaph in London. The earliest recording was from a British Movie-tone newsreel of 1929. Taking as its starting point Semper‟s sounds of absence, this paper will feature the work of Francis Alys, whose installation "Guards‟ (2004-5) relied as much on the sound of marching boots as it did on the strict choreography of filmed guardsmen. The paper will focus also on more recent recordings of the repatriation ceremonies at Wootton Bassett as captured by the film maker Kate Davies; her film "The Separation Line‟ will be shown as an example of how loss can be captured through omission and reliance on an aural sense over the visual.