Skip to content

Main Navigation

visibleproject
  • Fellowships
  • Stories
  • Streaming
  • Projects
  • Library
  • Parliaments
  • Who&What
    • What
    • Contributors
    • Yesterday-Today
    • Team and Steering Committee
    • Institutional network
    • About Visible
  • searchDiscover All

Music for (prepared) Bicycles

Caecilia Tripp
Period

2012 - 2014

Proposed by

Clark House Initiative

Location

Various locations

Topics
Gentrification and Urban Matters Social Design

About the project

Wanting to take John Cage to the streets, Music for (prepared) Bicycles finds ways to democratise the many makers—the conductor, the composer, the performer, the spectator, the on-looker, the bystander, the passer-by—as equals within a participatory score.

A music made by everyone.

Music for (prepared) Bicycles alters Cage’s ‘prepared piano’ into a sonic bicycle, like a moving instrument, spiked with electric guitar strings, capturing street sounds and sounds of strings hitting playing cards (invented by teenagers in socially disregarded suburbs) as it performs, trilling through places of affect within the city. This ongoing project acts as three sonic bicycle processions, a ‘music of change’ thriving in three global metropolises (Bombay/ New York/ Cape Town) as the bondage of a freed geography, beyond all boundaries.

chevron_left chevron_right
1 / 4
fit_screen
arrow_upward
Caecilia Tripp, Music for (prepared) Bicycles, 2015
arrow_upward
Caecilia Tripp, Music for (prepared) Bicycles, 2015
arrow_upward
Caecilia Tripp, Music for (prepared) Bicycles, 2015
arrow_upward
Caecilia Tripp, Music for (prepared) Bicycles, 2015

To begin Music for (prepared) Bicycles (2012) in Bombay with Clark House Initiative is to challenge further Cage’s entanglement with David Thoreau’s anarchistic Act and philosophy of Civil Disobedience, and to inspire, such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela did, to call out for people’s power as a means of change. The second score (2013) was created with the Puerto Rican Schwinn Club and CaribBeing in New York, tracing the history of the Young Lords Civil Rights Movement. The third score will take place in Cape Town 2015/16 with Chimurenga and local associations, going around Robben Island Prison as the ‘Cage of silence’, engaging shared futures.

Music for (prepared) Bicycles is not just an art project but ‘Life as Form’ and ‘Philosophy as Act’, a piece of music for everyone made by everyone

About the artist

Beyond geographical borders and with a critical eye, Caecilia Tripp's participatory art practice engages with civil disobedience and transnational post-colonialism at the crossroads of globalisation, shining a light on the invention of new languages, identities, sounds and social imagination as a transgressive 'Act of Making History' (Edouard Glissant, Making History, film in co-direction with Karen McKinnon). She was part of Spring in Gwangju curated by Claire Tancons for the 7th Gwangju Biennale. 'A poetics of relation.'  

Related Contents

chevron_left chevron_right
Chicago Boys While We Were Singing They Were Dreaming
Chicago Boys is a 1970s revival band and neo-liberalism study group, assembled by Kurdish artist and musician Hiwa K, whose interests lie in different modes of informal knowledge. The band plays 1970s popular music songs from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, England, Bangladesh, Poland, the Netherlands, and Lebanon. The performances of the songs are alternated with associative
Discover more
Khirkee Voice
Khirkee Voice was proposed as a Public Art Intervention in the form of a ‘community newspaper’, in response to the Coriolis Effect: Migration and Memory Residency at Khoj in 2016. Soon after this, Khoj commissioned us to produce the publication as a bilingual quarterly. Based in the neighbourhood of Khirkee Extension in South Delhi, the project
Discover more
Oysi Cantos del agua
Chile is the only country in the world where water is privatized, with dire consequences for the environment and indigenous communities. In central Chile, agribusiness and mining interests have pumped the aquifer dry meaning that no water flows through the streams to indigenous and mestizo family farms. Local groups fighting to repeal the water privatization
Discover more
Marinella Senatore
Marinella Senatore is a multi-disciplinary artist with a practice characterised by a strong collective and participatory dimension. Merging forms of resistance and local vernacular with popular culture, dance, music mass events and activism, her work rethinks the political nature of collective formations and presents an opportunity for the public to generate social change.
Discover more
Sing for Her
Migrant workers are a global phenomenon. In Hong Kong alone, there are more than 100,000 women from Southeast Asia employed as domestic helpers. They remain voiceless and invisible. Sing for Her aims to create public installations where the public can learn songs from migrant worker communities by interacting with karaoke sculptures. It emphasizes learning, equality
Discover more
Zilele Strimbe
Zilele Strimbe is a project about the rise and fall and rise of the National Dance Center Bucharest (CNDB), from 2005 – 2011, for the 2013 Visible Award proposal it will take two forms: a comic book and a musical. Both the comic book and the musical will be based on interviews that Alexandra Pirici
Discover more
We are unable to show you a video, here.
Details
© Visible 2025. All images © of their respective owners.
  • Fellowships
  • Stories
  • Streaming
  • Projects
  • Library
  • Parliaments
  • Who&What
  • Discover All
  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • Newsletter
© Visible 2025. All images © of their respective owners.
cached
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.OkPrivacy policy