House of Annetta: Soundings

A performance installation of exploratory musical and sonic pieces which ‘sound’ the site and spirit of House of Annetta.   

Spitalfields; where the east end meets the city of London has for centuries been a site of friction for the tectonic forces of capital and human life, a historic site of organising and people trying new things.  Set here is the House of Annetta, a large and beautiful Huguenot house built in 1705 that for the past 40 years has held an extraordinary story. In 1980 Annetta Pedretti came to live in the house, inhabiting it as a space for her experimental way of learning and organising community resistance through her exploration of cybernetics, the study of self-regulating systems.  Following her death, Annetta’s family donated the house to the community, inviting architectural collective Assemble to develop a future for the semi-renovated building. Assemble initiated the project House of Annetta to develop a centre for research, arts and solidarity work towards transformative systems change. 
 
Today the house is continuing the threads Annetta wove, exploring approaches and ideas for the ways we reproduce the world through our daily lives.  Adding to this tapestry, Postgraduate students from The Guildhall School of Music & Drama respond to the place, carefully creating and performing ‘soundings’ of the site for visitors to experience over time.