Return to Dreamphone
There’s a place we’re all trying to reach. Just outside of the digital day-to-day, or just past the physical horizon. There’s a church spire - or is it a radio tower? - marking the way against the sky. Each story we tell, each map we make, each meal shared, gets us a step closer. Every experience charted defines the route just a little more.
Exhibition: Return to Dreamphone
26–30 March, 11-5pm, Free
ACAVA Barham Park Studios, HA0 2HB
Unconference: We All Go Together
29 March, 11-4pm, Free
ACAVA Barham Park Studios
Return to Dreamphone is a new exhibition by Nick Murray. Expanding on their audio narrative piece Dial 55555 (née Dreamphone), this new work explores collective action through speculative fiction. Rooted in systems of care and collective reimagining, Return to Dreamphone asks inhabitants what a community archive can offer. A room-sized installation and a card table, shaped like Barham Park’s nearest floodplain, explore alternative communal archiving methods—questioning how they can resist and thrive in an increasingly commodified digital-physical ecosystem.
The works at Barham Park Studios are an in-progress document of Nick’s ongoing project mapping the shifting landscape along the River Brent. This chapter follows the Wembley Brook as it passes underneath Barham Park and meets the Brent at Stonebridge Park. The river becomes an allegorical path— it meanders, obscuring the search for a utopia that can be glimpsed, but remains just out of reach.
With the river at its heart, Return to Dreamphone invites audiences to hold both the potential of collective action and also the care needed for archiving in each hand. These forces exist as equal velocities, pushing in opposite directions from the present.
At the exhibition’s core – though hidden from view – is an archive artifact; a digital repository, separate from the internet, preserving knowledge from workshops and discussions held during Nick’s residency.
The archive relies on communal responsibility and asks for immediate care. Anyone can access it, add to it, and take from it. Each participant becomes the caretaker and custodian of a growing archive and living manifesto, within this library of communal utopian dreaming. By gifting knowledge and experience, the archive explores how the power of collective imagination can impact the politics of public space— welcoming past failures, dismantling structures and migrating between utopic borders.
How might a community-held server exist within Barham Park? A filing cabinet, a bird box, or a park bench? Perhaps a depository for the found stones or fallen leaves – What and who would it hold space for? How could it speak to the values of the park’s constituents? Would the server actually serve? Who would contribute to it and how long would its legacy last?
Nick Murray is a game-maker, composer and artist making interactive narrative work focusing on loss and digital cultures. They aim to respond to hyperlocal contexts through poetics, gameplay and workshops. Nick’s approach seeks to invite community, belonging and empathy in our spaces as we look towards a more collective future. From September 2024 Nick is the ACAVA resident artist at Barham Park.
www.nickmurray.horse / @cassettewitch
This exhibition is supported by ACAVA’s Barham Park Residency programme and Arts Council England.
Access
Barham Park has an accessible toilet, drinking water, quieter area, seating, step-free routes (with temporary ramp).