Expanded Realities Public Anthropology Student Showcase

As part of our Expanded Realities programme, a selection of non-fiction audio and VR projects created by students on UCL’s Public Anthropology postgraduate programmes will be presented. Nine sound-based documentary projects from students on the Audio Storytelling for Radio and Podcast MA programme and the Designing Audio Experiences: Art, Science, Production MA programme use sonic documentary techniques including spatial audio and contact recording to present a range of narratives and experiences. Two interactive virtual reality projects by students on the Immersive Factual Storytelling MA programme are also presented which bring together detailed research and thoughtful technical design to take the viewer into the world of their subjects.

The showcase will be included within our Expanded Realities exhibition at Rich Mix and will be free to visit, with no tickets required.

Audio Storytelling for Radio and Podcast MA

Good Little Church Girl
Clara Burns | 2025 | UK | 60’ | Audio | English spoken

From the red velvet pews of an evangelical Christian church in the American South, Clara was raised to believe the world exists in stark contrasts of black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. But as she began to see and experience life’s shades of grey, she knew that must be broken — because the church can’t be wrong. Twenty years after leaving the church, Clara untangles her complex relationship with church, faith, and confronts the legacy of religious trauma.

Ritual
Anna De Wolff Evans | 2025 | UK | 22’ | Audio | English spoken

Whether it involves, meditating in the morning, a pre-hockey game check, or drinking a glass of lemon water, each of us have our everyday routines. In our increasingly secular society, rituals are no longer necessarily grand events with incense and altars, but small, private moments we create for ourselves that help us mark out passages in our daily lives. Ritual explores how these small sequences we stick to have evolved for our modern life, and why we still value the structure they bring us.

What I Really, Really Want
Naomi Bloomstein | 2025 | UK | 14’ | Audio | English spoken

In 1965, 19-year-old Pepi Lemer was signed to Polydor Records and poised for stardom – but the dream didn’t take off. Fifty years on, another 19-year-old, Flo Wilkes, is competing for a spot at the Isle of Wight Festival chasing that same dream. What I Really, Really Want follows three women – Pepi, Flo, and pop artist Anna Straker – caught between hope and heartbreak and asks: what makes one artist make it, and another not?

Designing Audio Experiences: Art, Science, Production MA

A Voice Refuses To Please
Yuze Wang | 2026 | UK | 7’ | Audio

A Voice Refuses to Please examines how female voices in ASMR are routinely sexualized through culturally conditioned listening practices. This project approaches ASMR not as a neutral auditory phenomenon, but as a contested listening space in which gendered expectations and desire are actively produced. The work begins with familiar ASMR cues -soft fabric rustles, breathing, and mouth clicks – that are gradually increasingly abstracted to expose how these sounds are misheard as feminine and erotic despite the absence of any visible body or explicit identity.

Echoes of Home: The Dualities of Kowloon Walled City
Qianbei Chen | 2026 | UK | 10’ | Audio

Echoes of Home explores the contradicting memories of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City as a neighbourhood where living conditions were tough but which many former residents also view with nostalgia as a warm community for marginalised figures in the city. Original field recordings alongside oral testimonies from former residents and researches, create a rich portrayal of the Walled City and challenges its stereotypical portrayal as a slum.

Free Drums
Diamante’ Patterson | 2026 | UK | 10’ | Audio

Free Drums is an abstract spatial sound work exploring how sound becomes racialized in how certain bodies, gestures, and sonic expressions are heard, misheard, or silenced. Taking the form of a sonic performance across London, playing the city’s bollards as improvised drums, the work captures not only the percussive textures of the civic architecture, but also the reactions of the people who witnessed the recordings. In doing so it asks, who is allowed to make noise, who is policed for it.

Greenway Soundwalk
Chinma Johnson-Nwosu | 2026 | UK | 10’ | Audio

Greenway Soundwalk functions as a way of interrogating the accelerated development of privately-owned public spaces (POPS) in East London. The Greenway / East Bank in Stratford is a very recent example of the tensions that exist in these developments, raising questions of policing and securitisation, urban ecology, and liveable infrastructure. Using spatial field recordings, musical composition, and dialogue, the piece takes a sensory approach to city-making and asks: how can we ensure public space remains welcoming for the public?

Home
Carlos Bandi | 2026 | UK | 10’ | Audio
This composition is a spatial sound work that explores displacement, home, and fragmented identity through immersive listening. Developed from field recordings made in Dover and sound artefacts such as a Palestinian Belt, the work uses multichannel sound to reposition listening as a communal, ethical act. At its centre is a poem by Palestinian-French artist Yasmin Faraj, whose words anchor the composition. Her voice is treated not as narration but as a lived presence, unfolding across space to reflect the instability and multiplicity of displaced experience.

Things Not Heard
Maya Feldman | 2026 | UK | 10’ | Audio

Things not Heard experiments with radio art, spatial sound and ways of listening to interrogate the misconception that Zionism is inherently tied to Judaism. Led by the voice of Rayah Feldman, an 82-year-old Jewish woman, the piece combines interview audio, contact mic recordings and field recordings from her home to trace the story of how she came to actively support Palestine after being raised a Zionist. By foregrounding a perspective that resists singular understandings of Jewish experience, this work forms part of a wider movement to rethink and complicate Jewish representation.

Immersive Factual Storytelling MA

Across The Storm
Mingyang Hu, Sirui Wang, Siqi Xie | 2025 | UK | 10’ | Virtual reality | English spoken

Across the Storm tells the story of American storm chaser Celton and his life-and-death encounter while pursuing a violent storm. The project takes the viewer into Celton’s car, following him as he tracks down a tornado, capturing the elemental power of the storm and the thrill of seeing the force of destruction up-close. After that experience, Celton gained an entirely new perspective on storms, nature, life, death, and responsibility. But his love for storms remained as strong as ever.

Transcendence: Rhythm of Axé is an immersive VR experience exploring Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion rooted in ritual, ancestry, and spiritual energy. Using motion capture, spatial sound, and immersive visual design, the experience invites participants into evocative environments inspired by Brazil’s sacred spaces. Dreamlike zones unfold through archival interpretation, practitioner testimony, and symbolic interaction. The project emerged from a central question around how VR can ethically engage with sacred, intangible practices without reducing them to spectacle and prioritises authentic voices to honour Afro-Brazilian identity and resilience.