Join artist Thea Costantino (WA) at the premiere of this unique sound installation, which has been developed through collaborations with composer Tim Cunniffe (WA) and a local choir, the Churchlands Choral Society.

Nightly, when darkness falls, the aural landscape of the Perth Cultural Centre will be temporarily transformed. The PICA tower will glow with a beckoning light and transmit a flood of voices: a musical composition and a layered soundscape that reflects upon loss and recovery.

This momentary and evocative work, which takes place around nautical sunset, loosely references the maritime symbols of the lighthouse, which guides lost ships away from a hazardous shore, and the siren, whose haunting voice lures sailors to their deaths. Siren plays on tensions between drowning and drying, loss and desire, memory and forgetting, consciousness and oblivion.

In the creation of this work, the choristers have shared not only their voices, but also their experiences. Costantino developed the libretto based on the choir’s thoughts about loss and recovery, from which Cunniffe has constructed Siren’s sound world, leading to an ephemeral and poetic reactivation of public space and an opportunity for pause and reflection in the night streets.