The opening scene in History Of The Present shows opera singer Héloïse Werner attempting to recreate the sound of a military helicopter using only her voice. In Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon’s film, which is soundtracked by Annea Lockwood, Werner’s head twitches and her cheeks puff. She seems almost fatigued by the process, as if struggling to relate something beyond the reach of language.

Earlier in the day, I was part of a press tour of north Belfast’s so-called ‘peace lines’, vast, corrugated iron walls that run between, behind and through streets, dividing up areas of loyalist and republican sentiment. We’re here on the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which was supposed to mean that all those walls would be torn down by now. Instead, they’ve got bigger.

Immediately behind where we’re standing, in the district of Ardoyne (where librettist Fusco grew up), one of these structures splits two semi-detached houses. Though one house looks abandoned, might families from across the divide have once shared architectural foundations, overlapping brickwork, domestic ambient noises?

Fusco and Salmon’s new work is about growing up with a sense of conflict, of the latent threat of violence infiltrating your most intimate experiences, and the struggle to relate that in memory. It splices shots of Werner’s vocal improvisations with Salmon’s spare street footage and long cityscape sequences, showing the sprawl of Belfast city centre and harbour by day and night.

Lockwood’s extraordinary soundtrack was created by attaching geophones (a device that converts ground movement into voltage) to the peace lines and ‘playing’ them, as the composer puts it; that is, striking them to pick up vibrations imperceptible to the human ear. These noises are accompanied by audio-clips of Fusco as a child learning to speak, some later family recordings of her mother’s voice, and one archived recording of a riot unfolding, its sound an oddly celebratory cacophony of whistles and whoops.

Prior to the screening, Fusco and Salmon explain their decision not to use any archived video footage or photography of The Troubles, a 30-year period of violence sparked off by riots in August 1969 but fuelled by centuries of Catholic grievance at political repression. ‘There’s a visual score of images of that period that’s already circulating,’ Salmon says. To break through a set of pre-determined responses in audiences, it was necessary to forego the familiar, emotive clips of raids and assassinations, and the platitudes of documentary-style storytelling, which would not have broken any new ground in the audience’s emotional reckoning.

What is left, though, when the visual cliches and po-faced narration are stripped away? The answer is something more abstract, something harder to unpick. Throughout the film, there’s a sense of repressed trauma struggling to find a meaningful outlet. The sounds Lockwood wrings from the walls, almost impossibly low and resonant, suggest something deep in the city’s body, straining to escape. They form a neat bridge with Werner’s oral renderings of warfare; the vocalist also responds to the noise of a Saracen armoured car and, more audaciously, an interview in 1994 between journalist Jon Snow and republican leader Gerry Adams during an era of BBC restrictions when Adams’ words had to be voiced by an actor. In all cases, as with the walls’ vibrations, the coded effect is of something like displaced speech or articulation.

Then again, this film is not only about being unable to speak but also about being prevented from speaking. ‘A central question is about who has the right to speak and, crucially, in what way,’ Fusco says. ‘Are we allowed to speak with our own voices or are other people’s voices overlaid onto ours? Obviously that’s important in a colonised country, and that concern is inflected with an interest in working-class women’s voices.’ The artist’s libretto, made up of three spaced-out sections of recorded speech, comes closer than any other aspect of the work to expressing the rage and grief at this suppression of voice (and at the wider injustices of colonial rule) which is elsewhere only gestured at.

Having debuted in Belfast, History Of The Present will tour to Art Night Dundee, Edinburgh Art Festival and London’s Royal Opera House. After the screening, a couple of women stick up their hands and introduce themselves as Ardoyne residents. One of them doesn’t like the film and feels let down by the lack of reparative facts. The other says that although she didn’t ‘get it’, she ‘felt it in here’, gesturing to her chest. Perhaps she understood the film better than anyone. As Fusco puts it prior to the screening, ‘history enters the body; we experience it there first.’

History Of The Present, Dundee Rep, Saturday 24 June, part of Art Night; Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, Friday 11 August, part of Edinburgh Art Festival.