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.
A Singing Orna/Mentor's Performance or Ir/rational Practice
(2019)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition is an orna/mentor’s doing, an attempt, an essay, a performance, a line-of-thinking, a series of relations, a performance-research-model, a beginning of an orna/mentor’s manifesto. It might appear chaotic for some, and inviting for others. Its aim is to allow for the visitor to dive into the ‘orna’ (as in ‘urn’ meaning: an ornamented vase) mentored by a vocal performer. The exposition performs the raw and asymmetric intimacy of a research process searching to penetrate into (while at the same time radically opening up) that-which-is-yet-to-be-known. The performative caring has created an endless amount of philosophizing figures/sounds-in-themselves, as ornamented variations of an original musical score; a translation of one doing of another doing of another doing. Included in this exposition - as yet another ornamented variation – is a ‘peer-review-dialogue’ (a Q & A) between the orna/mentor and a Chorus of Unknown Reviewers. This dialogue has been included to clarify (or perhaps confuse even more) some of the questions that might arise in the mind of the visitor while moving through the exposition.
Mikael Bäckman REACT chapter
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Mikael Charlie Bäckman
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This is the artistic documentation referred to in my chapter Finding Voice: Developing Student Autonomy from Imitation to Performer Agency in the book Teaching Music Performance in Higher Music Education: Exploring the Potential of Artistic Research. Edited by Helen Julia Minor, Stefan Östersjö, Gilvano Dalagna, and Jorge Salgado Correia.
Stolen Voices
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Rebecca Collins
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Stolen Voices is a multi-component output consisting of four performances, an album, a peer-reviewed journal article and a book publication. The output is a collaboration between Rebecca Collins (University of Edinburgh) and Johanna Linsley (University of Dundee). Stolen Voices forms part of their five-year (2014–2019) project which invests eavesdropping as a method, combining this with a semi-fictional detective story. An ‘event’ has taken place in 4 sites on the UK coast (Bournemouth, Felixstowe, Seaham in County Durham and Aberdeen) and Collins & Linsley have been tasked to investigate. Eavesdropping is both subject and methodology of the research. Fieldwork in the form of site explorations and the practise of eavesdropping is combined with research into social, political and economic dynamics at the borders and margins of the UK, such as immigration and the impact of climate change on coastal landscapes.
Ornamentation based upon More-Than-Human-References: Moving Towards an Ecology of Trust
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This performance-presentation exhibits ornamenting processes of I/ voice /force and becomings between sounding notes/structures/forms. In short: articulating mattering-processes through force and form. Following a transforming web of acts and encounters, desire and urge - becomings of I/voice - are continuously meeting that-which-isn’t-yet-known. The form (or stage) presented, is a landscape and a twisted borderland made up of nomadic theory (Braidotti 2011) and artistic operatic madness (Belgrano 2014). The force is a chorus of intra-active voices mourning the loss of a city, loss of life and loss of trust. Departing from a nomadology illustrated conceptually, politically and contextually by Braidotti, the I/voice/force move through structures of sound, characters, emotions and statements chanted out of fear and pain. Each vocal sound marks a conclusion and a beginning. Limiting. According to Lacan, limits - being wounds or scars, or marks ”of irreplaceble losses as well as liberal thoughts.” According to Deleuze, limits - ”points of passages, thresholds, and markers of sustainability” (Braidotti 2011). Limits = Conclusions and Beginnings. What comes in between all limits are transformations, as in complex ecosystems of indeterminable encounters. Everyone being part of such an encounter is being touched by the presence of its in/non/human neighbours. Together they form a world of more-than-human-references. An irrational structure in it’s own becoming. The purpose of this paper is to show how each vocally fragmented ’conclusion-transformation-beginning’ of a microscopic moment, generates patterns being part of much larger global patterns. Along the way every act and every turn of I/voice/force will, by means of emergent properties, be diffracted and giving birth to multiple voices. One voice will become I-being-more-than-one-voice, trusting in its own ways, colours, shapes, forms, and non-sensical appearances. As a result, this paper calls for further investigation of transformative processes with/out limits, and thus moving towards an Ecology of Trust.
Thinking by Singing/ Singing by Thinking, or The art of Performing Translation through Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida’s concept of Acting-Intuition
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The aim of this paper is to present a performative encounter between a singing/thinking voice and the Japanese philosophical concept of Acting-Intuition proposed by Kitarō Nishida (1870-1945), founder of the Kyoto School (of Japanese Philosophy) around 1913. Departing from a vocal investigation of French composer Michel Lambert’s Leçons de Ténèbres (ca. 1664), the performer follows the thoughts crystallizing in the very act of singing. This intuitive act complies to Nishidas view of “our active engagement with our surroundings” and “never just the passivity of pure reception” (Krummel 2015:87). In the act of singing the singer and song are shaped along with the shaping of space itself. Thus, while singing a song and a space the singer is acted upon by both space and the song. In this way, acting-intuition proves to be a concrete mode of human existence in the world’s dynamism, providing a non-dual platform for determining human living. In the process of singing in a space along with an audience, the listeners are involved in the intuitive act and as well as in the translation process of incorporating ‘the other’ as well as “developing one’s identity” (Bouso 2016:112) The thinking by singing can thus be regarded as an experience of translating and transporting meaning from one place to another. Acting-Intuition can also be used a philosophical tool, for reminding us to “rethink our own linguistic categories, to reflect on ourselves at the same time as we reflect on others” (Bouso 2016:113). Applying Acting-Intuition as an artistic research methodology, might perhaps even help us re-envisioning a sense of trust and an “eternal link among all living beings, all beings in their aliveness, this shared transience, and the possibilities for renewal that follow downsfall”, allowing us to “facing the im/possibilities of living on a damaged planet” (Barad 2017:75).
ALEPH - Before the Beginning.
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano, henrik sputnes, Mark Douglas Edmund Price
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Before the Beginning.
Pause here. For the gradient
Of silence is changing.
Pause, to hear behind all sounds
The slope of silence deepening...
Ease my day
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Vilde Gunnes Bertelsen, Linda Aandalen, Mathias Walmann, Mussie Estifanos Ghebremichael, Thomas Brøsholen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A radio to ease your day, with a gentle and warm tune :)
Voic/musick/perform/ing: an intra-active spiritual matter?
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The role of a singer/musician/performer calls for an ability to capture the attention of an audience. In the 17th century the general concern would have been for the performer to develop musical and performative means in order to touch both hearts and souls of the listeners. In a blog from 2016, Finnish voice-artist Heidi Fast writes about a specific case study in a hospital environment (as part of her doctoral research) where she examines and explores the possibilities of non-verbal vocality to attune embodied relationality: “my task is not to ‘give voice to the patients’, instead, I try to create favourable conditions with my voice and presence to invite the participants to an entirely new dialogue. The role of the researcher is not a distant observer, but experiential in proximity.” The relationality enacted by performer/s, researcher/s, listener/s, participants in a musical event/encounter allows for overlappings of shared elevated (or even spiritual) experiences inspiring to new ways of thinking. Such existential experiences can be challenging to describe or to discursively articulate at a later stage. At the same time these ‘spiritual’ experiences provide a provocative point of departure for artistic research. The aim of this presentation is to open up for an intra-active discussion on relationality, with reference to voicing musicking/performing and the spiritual/existential experience; artistic research and religious studies/radical theology/new materialist/non-dualistic/holistic theories; artistic research in music and its potential contribution to existential meaning-making applicable for ex in pastoral care.
The music performed in this performance-paper refers to the city of Paris in the 17th century, to the fallen city of Jerusalem as described in the biblical Lamentations, and to Gothenburg and an early 20th century water cistern. Experiencing walls and scores constructed in the past sheds new light on future structures and potential relations.
Presented as "Voicing: an intra-active spiritual matter?"
at National Network for Artistic Research in Music (Nationellt nätverk för konstnärlig forskning i musik / NFKM) 23-24 Aug 2017, Royal College of Music, Stockholm, Sweden
Glories to Nothingness
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano, Björn Ross
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
GLORIES TO NOTHINGNESS
SORROW. MADNESS. NOTHING.
A voice. A gesture.
A beginning. An experiment. A sketch.
A becoming.
... based on the story of a singer’s performance of paradoxes and passions
in 17th century Venice.
... based on a singer’s research – performed in the 21st century – about the Art of Performing Everything and Nothing.
GLORIES TO NOTHINGNESS is an artistic research project investigating performative acts of moving between Vocalizing ≈ Articulating ≈ Mattering ≈ Trusting.
The research question: How to perform trust?
Every movement, utterance, projection and articulation is consciously exploring and honoring Nothingness as an idea and a concept much debated at the time when the first public opera productions were performed in Venice around 1640. Based on a performative research approach and new materialist theories, performance acts are methodologically diffracted through musical fragments composed by Luigi Rossi (c. 1597 – 1653), Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) and Francesco Sacrati (1605-1650); through selected poems from the volume Le Glorie della signora Anna Renzi romana (Venice, 1641); through thoughts entangled with figures such as RESISTANCE, VULNERABILITY and TRUST; through the practice of exploring force and form as every day performative acts.
Elisabeth Belgrano
vocal projections / performance
Björn Ross
visual projections / scenography
The City of Fire and the Assembly of Death: Two Encounters
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition is a tale of (at least) two encounters performed as a Lesson in the Shadows of Death. In these shadows we find sounding voices, moving bodies and relations between what might be described as extreme opposites. What can be found in place nick named the City of Fire, or the Assembly of Death? Perhaps an opening to this question can be found in this exposition.
Lessons in the Shadow of Death
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A voice.
Alone.
Sounding as a prayer.
As a meditation.
Moving through lamentation and hope.
In the middle of life.
In the middle of living.
In the shadow of Death.
There is a voice.
Voice of Life itself.
Voice of God.
A performance of a vocal prayer.
Voice - Elisabeth Belgrano
in progress...open exposition comments (0)
This exposition is a tale of (at least) two encounters performed as a Lesson in the Shadows of Death. In these shadows we find sounding voices, moving bodies and relations between what might be described as extreme opposites. What can be found in place nick named the City of Fire, or the Assembly of Death? Perhaps an opening to this question can be found in this exposition.open exposition comments (0)