Ain Bailey & Imani Mason Jordan: Atlantic Railton: LIVE
Serpentine Pavilion
7:30pm, 10 September 2021




Presented alongside Ain Bailey’s Atlantic Railton, Imani Mason Jordan performs a lyrical live response drawing on transcripts from Bailey’s original commission. Expanding the work through reflections on spatial politics, architecture, and Black geographies, the performance weaves together new text with a constellation of voices, sounds, and musical elements from Bailey’s composition.

Film credits:  Katarzyna Perlak, Hicham and Katarzyna Perlak. Photographed by Ingrid Pollard. BSL interpretation by Clifton Deaf Services.


Ain Bailey

Atlantic Railton

2021
Part of Listening to the City

Serpentine Pavilion, West Carriage Drive,
London W2 2AR 
Atlantic Railton is a multi-layered sound work commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries, tracing the intertwined histories of community organising in Brixton, South London. Named after Atlantic Road and Railton Road, sites closely linked to Black British intellectual, cultural, and activist life, the work reflects on spaces shaped by figures such as C. L. R. James and Olive Morris, and movements including the British Black Panthers and the 1981 Brixton uprising.

Drawing on personal and collective memory, Bailey weaves together intimate conversations with collaborators, Sharon Elliott, Claudette Parry, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinksi, and Marc Thompson, alongside field recordings, archival protest audio, and steel-pan music performed by Matthew Phillip of the Mangrove Steelband. The composition forms a sonic constellation of voices and sites, foregrounding networks of care, resistance, and belonging active from the 1970s through the early 2000s.

Image credits: Left, Pot from a pot banging protest to save Lambeth Women's Project, 2012, courtesy of Ain Bailey ; Right, Courtney Laws OD OBE outside the Brixton Neighbourhood Community Association Advice and Counselling Centre, courtesy of Claudette Parry Laws