Re-LINK

For 48 hours Graeme Miller’s seminal radio installation, LINKED will live again. Arguably the largest sculptural entity in the capital, it is comprised of 20 analogue radio transmitters that stretch for 3 miles along the edges of the M11 Link Road in East London marking and re-building the 500 houses demolished for the road. It opened in 2003 as a semi-permanent installation and part of the collection of the Museum of London.

The transmitters broadcast on a single frequency and with a receiver the walker is able to navigate the neighbourhoods adjacent to the motorway finding pools of sound that relate to the specific locations. Each surviving transmitter has now broadcast more than a million times where the voices of former residents describe and revive the lost spaces. Over 19 years this work about the politics and poetry of place has become increasingly about time itself and the transmitters themselves have suffered its effects making LINKED an almost secret and cult work. 

Re-LINK, the first of an annual series of such gatherings, invites the public to collect a receiver and discover the work fully restored. It is a chance for those who know the work to experience it again and for lost narratives to be heard once more. In the afternoon of Saturday 24^th in the art deco hall of Leytonstone Library a Sound Table, a rolling studio dialogue will invite a changing mix of former residents, writers, artists, activists, interviewers, interviewees and passers-by to hear each other and consider the themes and shifting meanings of this public work. 

“I found myself wishing that more of Britain was covered by such transmissions, ghosts of ravaged neighbourhoods set free to speak again.”

Libby Purves, The Times