Abstract This project presentation introduces an ongoing practice-based doctoral research that investigates how minoritised and endangered forms of everyday knowledge—such as vernacular speech, family voices, and affective memory—can be activated through narrative public art as artistic research. Focusing on sonic and relational practices beyond the purely verbal, the research explores how voice operates as an epistemic medium through which experiences of otherness, distance, and belonging are made perceptible in public space.
The presentation centres on Between the Lines, a participatory sound installation developed across culturally specific sites in the UK and China. By employing public telephones as interfaces, the work invites participants to listen to intimate greetings spoken in a hometown dialect and to contribute their own spoken reflections on moments of being culturally “out of place.” These exchanges foreground forms of knowledge that are often overlooked, unarchived, or rendered invisible—domestic speech, oral memory, and emotionally charged vocal expressions—while situating them within a shared public environment.
Rather than treating language as information, the project approaches voice as an embodied, temporal, and affective practice that exceeds full articulation. Through listening and speaking, participants engage with forms of knowing that are sensed rather than fully explained, revealing how sonic practices can sustain endangered conceptual worlds embedded in everyday life. Methodologically, the research employs participatory action research, positioning artistic practice as an iterative mode of inquiry in which participants contribute to the ongoing formation of meaning.
The presentation reflects on how narrative public art can operate as a heterotopic space for the negotiation of minoritised voices and examines the role of sonic artistic research in making fragile, situated knowledges audible within contemporary visual, sonic, and digital cultures.