Voicing the Political: The polyvocal is political

This study session presents two film screenings: Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s Promised Lands (2015, 20’) and Lis Rhodes’ Pictures on Pink Paper (1982, 35’). A short talk by Sarah Hayden will probe how the two films use polyvocality and the written word to create ambiguity within political work. The discussion will be prompted by short statements from some of the most vivid and provocative theorists of voice today: Adriana Cavarero, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Brandon LaBelle and Norie Neumark.

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.