4′33″ (Latchkey): Domestic Scores (after John Cage)

4′33″ (Latchkey) — Domestic Score I
(after John Cage)
6 June, 2026
Elayne Adamczyk Harrington is a durational audio work developed as part of an ongoing series of adaptations of John Cage’s 4′33″.

The series re-situates Cage’s framework of silence as a lived, socially conditioned field shaped by housing precarity, domestic pressure, and the contested acoustics of contemporary life in Dublin (2026).

The work operates as an observational and constructed score of shared domestic space. It is composed from performed and digitally manipulated vocal imitations of repetitive domestic call-signals—primarily the repeated invocation of “mam / mammy”—looped, layered, and filtered into an intensified rhythmic structure.

Rather than documenting a specific individual or event, the work constructs an abstracted sonic environment shaped by repetition, interruption, and response.

A central focus of the work is the repeated call to “mother” as a structural pressure signal. Within the piece, this becomes a continuous activation of care rather than a singular utterance. The mother figure is positioned not as an individual subject, but as a site of ongoing obligation—where attention, responsibility, and response are persistently required across time and context.
The work reflects on how domestic care is continuously made visible through demand, and how the private space of the home becomes permeable and its visibility penetrates wall and window, through repetition and interruption.

Sleep, intimacy, rest, and daily routine are not separate from care but are repeatedly interrupted by its invocation. In this sense, the domestic environment becomes a site of ongoing negotiation between competing needs and limited capacities.

More broadly, the work considers conflicts of space and value within domestic settings: between children’s needs for attention and play, adult requirements for rest, work, intimacy, privacy, silence and control, and the structural limitations of care provision within contemporary housing conditions. It reflects on how agency is distributed within constrained environments, where supervision, access, and attention become continuous forms of negotiation.

Across the series, silence is reframed beyond absence and rendered as a lived and contested condition—shaped by proximity, responsibility, pressure, expectation, conflicting values and the uneven distribution of care within domestic and housing systems.

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