Altodi Poltodi (This shore, That shore)
(2023)
author(s): Savyasachi Anju Prabir, Amrita Barua
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Altodi Poltodi thinks through aspects of permeability and preservation, provoking an image of shadowy protector figures. How do they interact with a landscape, what could they want to protect and where do they mark their boundary lines? Drawing from the ancient stories of Rakhandars, mythic beings that guard or protect Goan villages, this collaborative process weaves personal stories with the land and history of Goa. Altodi Poltodi began as a conversation between two friends on a bridge over a river, in a state of suspension, connecting two shores – those of memory and the present.
A History of Violence
(2023)
author(s): Kai Ziegner
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Through experimental writing and conceptual photography, my PhD uses my own biography to investigate the consequences of societal transformation processes in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The focus is on the period of regime change known as the »Wendezeit« in the late 1980's to the early 1990's in East Germany. To date, this subject has been analysed primarily by scholars of history and cultural sciences, while approaches to this topic by artistic researchers are still rare.
With my research, I would like to reveal causes for the outbreaks of violence that accompanied this radical shift. The objective of my PhD is thus to submit critical testimony to the silence about seldom-discussed side effects of the transformation during and after the turnaround which Germans call the »Wende«. Based on the example of (my own) individual history, it demonstrates how authoritarian regimes and structures impacted on three generations of citizens, and how they affected the individuals. Throughout an experimental narrative, outbreaks ofsenseless violence are treated as side effects of disruptive transformation processes, just as are ambivalent situations in which actors of social change recognise themselves to be simultaneously victims and perpetrators of violent incidents. Since personal memories and historical documents served as the basis of this work, the central challenge of my artistic research was to carve out generalisable elements from individual examples, and to try out and experiment with various textual and photographic formats to find an adequate way to present the research material. Important sources of inspiration for this process included works like Alexander Kluge’s »Lebensläufe« (‘Case Histories’), Primo Levi’s »Ist das ein Mensch?« (‘If This Is a Man’), Walter Benjamin’s »Denkbilder« [Thought-Images], Klaus Theweleit’s »Männerphantasien (‘Male Fantasies’), Georges Didi-Huberman’s »Bilder trotz allem« (‘Images in Spite of All’), Claude Lanzman’s documentary film »Shoah«, and W.G. Sebald’s novel »Austerlitz«. The result of my research is an experimental book that portrays the multidimensional nature, polyphony and complexity of the subject, and offers the readers an opportunity to deal with the material in the way they desire, and perhaps to make it useful for their own work and research.
The Labour of Listening in Troubled Times
(2023)
author(s): Kate Lacey
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article explores some of the implications and limitations of framing political debates as a politics of voice and builds on the idea of “listening out” as a necessary technique of political action (Lacey 2013: 3-21). Political listening in this sense is about keeping channels of communication open, accepting ongoing difference and conflicts of interest. It is, therefore, a difficult, challenging and risk-laden labour in the best of times and all the more so in times of division and conflict (Bickford 1996; Hofman 2020). Meanwhile, listening in media studies has tended to conceive of listening, if not as entirely passive, then primarily as a kind of decoding or translation practice – a practice of response. This article is concerned with the labour of political listening in the mediated public sphere. It describes the productive power of listening to generate a space for “voice” and explores the labour involved in preparing the space, time, setting, mood, technologies, and techniques for listening and how that labour is variously valued and exchanged. And it builds on work that thinks about listening not exclusively in relation to sound, finding that sonic vocabulary and metaphors can help reframe notions of the public sphere and politics long shaped and distorted by a reliance on the visual registers of print culture and the spectacle.
Covered Mouths Still Have Voices
(2023)
author(s): Tom Western
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
overed Mouths Still Have Voices
Tom Western
UCL Geography – t.western@ucl.ac.uk
Abstract
The title of this essay is a political slogan. It borrows from the chant of medical workers in Greece, who have been asserting that covered mouths still have a voice (“Και τα καλυμμένα στόματα βγάζουν φωνή”) since long before the Covid-19 pandemic began at the start of 2020. The slogan has become politically useful on wider scales since then, and I take it as a jumping off point – a means of understanding political techniques of vocality that have been retuned in pandemic contexts. My focus is on forms of vocal-spatial resistance, hearing how people contest political hierarchies of vocality that have been tightened during Covid, and create new spatialities of voice through pandemic activisms. The essay listens to how voices signal and sound out multiple forms of mobilisation, and it outlines a global sense of voice that develops as a result. From this, ways of hearing mouths and voices emerge not just in terms of speaking and sounding, or only as forms of identity and agency, but as a gathering, a refusal, a resource, a navigational tool, a transformation.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to friends in Athens. To Kareem al Kabbani and Urok Shirhan, whose soundworks resound into these pages. To Fani Kostourou, Pasqua Vorgia, and John Bingham-Hall for organising and running ‘The City Talks Back’. To Fadia Dakka for her kindness and patience in waiting for this essay to be done.
From a Modern/Colonial Sensorium to Relational Response-ability: Listening Into What Separation Has to Say
(2023)
author(s): Sarah Amsler
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Dedication – to life cut on the sharp side of separation
I dedicate this essay to the heartbreak on the sharp side of the sadness of separation. Every pulse and river that has been silenced by insensibility to life’s gifts of companionship and cries for care. Every species, kind, and gender sentenced to death for their illegibility, unprofitability, their queer intimacy with the mysteries and reciprocities of creation. Every relation of every victim of every scale of every act of extraction, enslavement, genocide, ecocide, epistemicide, and linguicide that is committed by the white colonial capitalist heteropatriarchal human West.
2. Listening Tables
(2023)
author(s): Rajni Shah
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The writing that follows (interspersed between other articles) is a series of personal reflections on “listening” – a term which, for me, refers to an embodied attentive state, including but not limited to the ears. I write from my own experiences as a trans non-binary person of colour and reflect specifically on the ways in which listening work relates to anti-racist and anti-colonial work. Within the writing, certain words are hyperlinks. These are offered as moments of dialogue – moments where you are invited, if you wish, to read other texts that are in relationship with the particular word, phrase, or idea that is linked. At the end of the section titled “4. Portals,” there is a short list of links to artists and authors who are directly mentioned in the text as well as a list of further references in case they are of interest.
