Voicing the Political: Attuning to Voice

This session places Lis Rhodes’ film Riff (2004, 18’) in dialogue with Laure Prouvost’s Swallow (2013, 12’) followed by a brief discussion of the interaction between breath, the body and phrasing in both films. Eleni Ikon will discuss how the female-sounding voice continuously invokes new philosophical, political and aesthetic challenges. We will listen to the mythical voices of the Sirens and the oral histories of funeral lamentation, along with the vocal experiments of contemporary composers and performers, and the ever-presence of automated voices across the public and private realms. A collective exercise will explore our attentiveness to the materiality of the speaking voice.

This season’s study sessions address vocality as a phenomenon at the confluence of embodiment and technicity, the individual and the collective, interior and exterior, sound and sense. Each session will comprise screenings, collective readings, and listening experiments. By discussing language-based artistic and literary practices, we will work together to interrogate the politics of how voice is used, represented, imagined and heard.

Voicing the Political has been programmed as part of Voices in the Gallery, an AHRC-funded research project, led by Sarah Hayden at the University of Southampton in conjunction with John Hansard Gallery and Nottingham Contemporary. The event is part of a series of discussions about the materiality of text and of the speaking voice in contemporary moving image.