SARC Mobile - Georgios Varoutsos

Meet at Buoy Park, BT3 9FG.

A bespoke field work vehicle for specialised multichannel audio-visual experiences, recording and broadcast, this unique facility combine professional multichannel HD audio-visual capturing and streaming equipment as well as an immersive playback system allowing for research, dissemination and public engagement.

Sonorities presents two projects curated and artistically produced by Pedro Rebelo. Both works take advantage of SARC Mobile’s technical capabilities and result in site-specific exploratory listening interventions. The sessions take place throughout the festival with a duration of 15 minutes, accommodating four members of the audience at a time. Advance booking is essential.

Listening to the Edge is a site-specific project for the Belfast Harbour, using the SARC Mobile as a temporary listening space on the waterfront. The harbour has long been a threshold: a place of departure and arrival, tied to emigration, immigration, and the circulation of people, goods, and ideas. It is both a connector and a divider, shaping Irish identity through experiences of leaving, returning, and belonging. The project will draw on field recordings made along Belfast Lough and the harbour area, blending natural coastal environments with the industrial sounds of docks, cranes, and ferries. Archival material related to migration and shipbuilding may be integrated, creating a dialogue between past and present. Inside the acoustically treated SARC Mobile, these recordings will be spatialised in 7.4.1 surround, creating an intimate and immersive portrait of the harbour as a living, layered soundscape. The work also has a public-facing component.

Through the van’s outdoor stereo system, fragments of harbour sounds and voices will be projected into the surrounding environment, encouraging passers-by to pause, listen, and reflect on the histories carried by the site. The inside and outside thus operate as parallel listening experiences: one immersive and detailed, the other expansive and shared. Listening to the Edge highlights the role of listening in connecting identity, place, and memory. By situating the SARC Mobile in Belfast’s harbour, the project opens a space for reflection on how coastlines hold stories of movement and belonging, and how listening can reframe our relationship to migration and the sea.

Location: W5 Car Park