The Home is a headphone-based sound experience for one participant at a time in a physical installation—a custom-built house—situated in public space. Conceived to give each participant a visceral experience of the problematic question “Why don't you just leave?” the binaural sound design is comprised of numerous elements and layers, built from interviews we conducted with eight survivors of domestic abuse. Their voices are used as compositional elements both to convey information and experience as well as elicit non-linguistic or pre-verbal emotion and specific visceral feelings, such as entrapment or romantic intoxication, for each solo participant. The women's voices are layered into multifaceted sound design: participants might hear dishes being done, radio interview or news clip from a TV in another room, footsteps, a constantly intensifying phone notification, with voices which are at times isolated, montaged, or layered into sound.  Each physical room and object was designed and chosen in response to the sound design. As the participant moves through the house, the environment becomes more surreal and the element of surveillance increases: after passing through a foyer, a bedroom, and a laundry room, they enter a space that is part-museum and part-police evidence room. The voices become more isolated and the participants hear stories of specific objects as they stand in front of them. The sense of being watched becomes acute. In the end they face a two-way police mirror, which they realize is the other side of the foyer mirror they saw at the front door. They see through the mirror to the front door that they can no longer reach. They then enter a waiting room in which they encounter a group of women—the headphones are collected by a stagehand, and the participant then enters an office where they speak to a domestic violence counselor, at which point they also learn that the women in the waiting room were those whose voices they heard in the headphones.

Links: https://vimeo.com/393598812

Concept and direction: Annie Saunders 
Interactive sound and sound system design: Jackie Zhou 
Installation production design: Nina Caussa 
Interactive lighting design: Andrew Schneider  
Live cueing by surveillance: Lisa McGinn, Natalie Hratko, Kevin Hanley  
Production and logistics management: James Okumura, Megan Kingery 
This project was commissioned by Santander Bank and created in partnership with both the National Network to End Domestic Violence and the National Coalition to End Domestic Violence, as part of an ongoing campaign to raise awareness and support organizations working directly with survivors of domestic violence and financial abuse. It is currently in development to tour, and to be adapted for digital so that it can be accessible worldwide to audience participants in their own homes.

Jackie Zhou (US) Jackie! Zhou (she/they) is a Los Angeles-based artist who is keen on blurring the lines between formats and disciplines. From music videos to documentaries, her directorial work aims to explore and celebrate human experiences. Her sound design work has been Emmy-nominated and credits include: Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, HBO’s United Skates, and live work presented at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Jackie! especially thrives with collaborative projects that defy the standard borders of traditional formats. She believes good humans make great storytellers. 

Annie Saunders (US) is a multidisciplinary creator and director of site-specific experiences and has created award-winning multi-platform projects for major arts institutions including the Public Theater, The Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Broad Stage, and Summerhall as well as site-specific projects in disused spaces set for demolition and experiential campaigns for multinational brands. She is a member of the inaugural ONX Studio, an invited accelerator for artists working in extended reality through NEW INC and the Onassis Foundation, and an alumnus of the Devised Theater Working Group for next-generation performance-makers at the Public Theater. Saunders is the founder and artistic director of site-specific performance company Wilderness, and her experimental project The Wreck for Opera Omaha was called ‘ingenious...a persuasive expression of complex female feeling,” by the Wall Street Journal.