Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

• 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.
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• 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.
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• 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.
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• 1. Learning the shape of racist rooms (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.
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• 4. Portals (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.
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  Dialogue on Experiments in Listening (2023) author(s): Ed McKeon and Rajni Shah published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Rajni Shah is a performance maker, writer, and producer. Their practice-based doctoral research – Experiments in Listening – was published in the Performance Philosophy book series in 2021. It effects a shift that provides a key thematic thread of this special issue of the Journal of Sonic Studies, one that interweaves all the contributions in different ways but is rarely stated explicitly: listening-based practices dissolve ossified lines separating “art” from “life,” aesthetic practices from the political. Shah’s reflections are presented as this red thread, a collection of vignettes that can be followed as one line or taken as an invitation to pause between each article, resonating in that liminal and medial space. It is fitting, then, that we round off the issue with a review of Shah’s book, not in the mode of judgement – a critic’s 1- to 5-star rating – but in the spirit of our thematic of voice and listening, as a dialogue. Co-guest editor Ed McKeon, whose own jointly-authored contribution to this issue uses dialogue as a method, posed the questions.
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