Sounds of Asylum Bristol: Musicking and secretly public commoning in a city of sanctuary and violence

This paper contributes to urban studies debates on the commons-as-practice by examining the “secretly public” musicking spaces co-created by people seeking asylum and allies in Bristol, UK—a city where the language of sanctuary coexists with state-sanctioned forms of slow violence and uneven processes of urban regeneration. The analysis draws on 18 months of ethnographic and participatory research with a group of around 60 men and women of diverse origins, many seeking asylum, who convened weekly music sessions. Building on perspectives that show how sound shapes the sensing, sharing, and reconfiguration of urban space, the study attends to the sonic and affective registers, urban geographies, and (in)visible spaces of sociality that emerged from the group. It argues that “public secrecy” constitutes a condition of possibility for commoning in cities shaped by sanctuary initiatives and state enforcement infrastructures. The paper conceptualises a secretly public commons as a collective practice that composes publicness through thresholds of visibility, generating shared affective, social and material resources while exceeding normative frames of (in)visibility and (un)deservingness that dominate public narratives of asylum. In doing so, this paper extends debates on the urban commons, sanctuary, and sonic urbanism by showing how sonic practices reconfigure public presence under intersecting forms of dispossession, and by using ethnographic and participatory approaches to address what tends to go unnoticed in studies on urban commons and sanctuary urbanism.