extratextual writing practices
kinetic audiobook
sound technology
algorithmic translation
serendipity
language-based musical practice
language and music
instrumental music
practising and performing music
linguistic layer of music
<< Krystyna Kulisiewicz
Music is often compared to and described as a language. There is no doubt that these two share a lot of resemblances – they both use sounds, they both can carry a meaning, they both are universal, yet various in different cultures. They strongly influence each other both in direct and indirect ways.
During my musical education, I have noticed that the main attention during practicing a piece of music often lays on the musical layer – playing the right notes, applying appropriate techniques, executing fitting articulation, dynamics and agogics. The linguistic layer – e.g. the annotations in the score, the title of the piece, the lyrics of the vocal part – is often seen as something extra, it is not considered to be the most important element of a musical piece.
In my language-based musical practice I want to focus on the linguistic layer and discover in which ways it can improve my playing. I want to take the language as a central point of my practice and use it in various manners – not only by paying attention to the meaning it carries, but also to phonetic, syntactic or interlingual elements of it. Not only when the text is directly present in the score (e.g. in vocal pieces) but also when it is more subtle or seem not to be present at all. My aim is to push this idea to a limit and discover how much inspiration I can get from a language-based approach to musical practice in its broad understanding.
While practising an instrumental line that appears in a piece with text (e.g. vocal piece), I approach the practice from the linguistic point of view. I look at the text and gather information from it – what is the meaning, which words are used, what is the language and its characteristics. I take into consideration the relation between the instrumental line and the text – do they imitate each other, is the melody of the instrumental line parallel to the vocal line, does it appear in the same moment?
During my practice so far I have noticed a few examples of how the instrumental line can be influenced by the text of the vocal part. For my self-experiment I used an aria from J.S.Bach’s cantata “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” BWV 12, called “Ich folge Christo nach”.
In the first instance I focused on the meaning of the first words of the aria and how they relate to the melody of the instrumental line. Practicing this line with focus on this meaning (ascending line as an expression of following) is presented [See Figure 1].
Second example focuses on the accents in the vocal line – the words “Ich folge Christo nach” have accents that can be expressed on the instrument by applying certain articulation. [See Figure 2].
Last idea I had in this practice session was focusing on a rhetorical gesture present in the music, where the melo-rhythmical figure in the instrumental line can be linked to the meaning and the sound of the word that the vocalist is performing. [See Figure 3]
CREDITS
Krystyna Kulisiewicz, Language-based musical practice, 15.02.2023. Copyright: Krystyna Kulisiewicz
A Text and a Reader (person who reads) go on a date. The Text advertised for itself on Tinder: “Average number of signifiers, looking for a companion who will activate me, preference for Ideal Readers or Super-Readers.” The Reader was looking for something to occupy him/herself on a 10 hour airflight, so she decided to take up with the Text.
They had a basic disagreement that made the date not go smoothly at first. The Reader was expecting Meaning to inhere in the Text that was already pre-packaged and formulated. The Text was hoping for a more collaborative relationship with the Reader. The Text only offered a series of structures which the Text hoped would catalyze certain effects—but really, the Text saw it was 100% the Reader’s responsibility to come up with meaning. The Text saw a book as a picnic where the author brings the words and the Reader brings the meaning. Really the Text and the Reader had very little in common—but the Reader kept dating the Text, becuz the Text was so good-looking (The Text used beautiful words like “evanescence” and “choleric”).
Finally, at the 8th date, the Text burst out, “Reader, your subjectivity sucks!! It is mired in a false consciousness in which lodges a brittle resistance to perceiving my symbols!”
The Reader shot back: “Look whose talking—I am on the 8th date with the Text, and still, NO MEANING IN SIGHT! Not even a subject!”
“A Paranoid Reparative Meets a Text” (performance, 2018-2019) is a performative which attempts to re-enactment of what happens (mentally, cognitively, affectively) when we read a text. It is a dramatization of the failure of a reader to grasp a text.
Performed at Wendy’s Subway, New York City, 2018 - LINK
<< Andrea Liu
My artistic practice spans text-based visual art, digital collage and performance art . Saussure’s seminal theory on the “Arbitrary Nature of the Sign” tells us that a word is comprised of two components: the signified and signifier. The “signifier” is the sound of the word, whereas the “signified” is the abstract idea to which the word refers. For example, for the word “tree”, the signified is the idea of “a large plant with branches and leaves”, and the signifier is the actual sound one makes when one says the word “tree”. Together these two components—the signifier and the signified—make up a “sign,” which is a word.
Much of my text-based visual art comes out of exploiting this gap between signified and signifier: to pit the abstract idea to which a word refers against the materiality of the word itself (the visuality of the letters, the sound of the word, etc.) My artistic medium is language from which I ‘sculpt’ texts ranging from the apparently objective generalizing statement to subterranean outbursts seeping through a crevice in a dominant signifying system, often using language against its hegemonic codification, complicating the relationship between signified (i.e. abstract meaning to which language refers) and signifier (the materiality/visuality of the words/letters themselves). My work is not “retinal art“ (Duchamp’s term); meaning it cannot be captured in images alone, but is often dependent on the context around it.
As I come out of an art criticism background, I am intrigued by how the discursivity within criticism can be rendered performative, dramatic, or visually arresting, and how writing itself can be rendered a performative act. Ephemera often plays a large role in my performances, whether it be maps, diagrams, index cards, as well as various text-based visual art pieces that are “activated” within my performance.
Barthes’ 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’ rejects the monolithic pre-fabricated authority of the author as the sole determinant of meaning the text and hails the “birth of the reader” — the multifarious positions of the reader that comprise the true producers of meaning.
In any given performance, there is a vast reserve of untapped resources: the audience. Visitor One thru Eight (2016 - 2019) is a performance of mine where I inhabit the role of 8 spectators who have come to my performance. Visitor One wants to be integrated into the grand narrative of appreciating art. Visitor Two believes in the mystery and the unknowability of art. Visitor Three believes in the emancipatory potential of extreme experiences. Visitor Four yearns for linear and emotional storytelling. Visitor Five believes art should be something direct and visceral, an intimate offering amongst friends. Each Visitor is a hypothetical speculation on an audience member.
I incorporate the opinions, desires and expectations of the audience as the content of my performance. The audience is a crystal through which various desires, ideologies, assumptions backgrounds, biases are refracted, projected, frustrated, appeased, challenged or fulfilled. Visitor One Thru Eight inhabits various modes of performance in order to unpack what are the conditions and ideologies that underlie spectatorship. Performance commissioned and produced for RIB Art Space (Rotterdam, NL 2019) the HTMlles Feminist Festival of Digital Art and Media Culture (Montreal 2016)
CREDITS
1 - 3. Andrea Liu, Visitor One Thru Eight
<< Ling Liu
My current research takes the form of a series of experimental vocal and visual performance representing particular rules of rhythm in Chinese poetry within the context of Chinese lyric aesthetics through an integrated art form combining poetry, writing and painting. The research is achieved through adopting traditional rhythmic patterns and principles in Chinese language in the overarching context of lyric aesthetics as the means to reclaim the traditional culture, and to retrieve its history.
Chinese poetry, writing, and painting (like all cultural forms of expression), in the context of Chinese aesthetics, involves both meaning and form. This research is an attempt to disclose (with sonic-visual experiments) the formative rhythmic patterns that constitute deeply rooted traditions of Chinese linguistic expression. Both writing and singing in Chinese are embodied forms - incorporating intricate vocal nuances and subtle ‘drawing’ gestures. Rather than considering the textual content of the poems or lyrics, in these works I focus instead on sound patterns, lyrical intonation, rhythmic precision, and forms of drawing rhythm of the language.
In the progress of this investigation, I have identified the methodological approaches toward the question why the traditional rhythmic patterns in Chinese language matter in the contemporary time and how to reconstruct the traditional integrated artistic expression with a contemporary approach. I propose that it is possible to represent sonic patterns in the language without the consideration of specific textual content, and to reclaim this orthodoxy by integrating traditional artistic form with contemporary multi-media means.
In order to examine the use of traditional rhythmic rules in contemporary practice, I started with the essential question why rules of rhythm matter. Using two sound experiments exploring rhythmic form in both repeating and ‘breaking’ rhythmic rules I probe the necessity of rules from a practice related perspective. I first establish the formal rhythm, then dissect these rules to demonstrate that any interference causes the loss of articulation of a poem/lyric. In this process my aim is not merely to demonstrate that the shattering of ‘rules’ causes the loss of meaning or order, but rather to explore latent, potential or expressive results that unravel into acoustic and visual ‘layers’ that both echo and dissolve. The gradual dissection of rhythmic order is a key to this work.
Taking one sound work from this series of experiments as an example. The Sad Zither [锦瑟] is a vocal performance investigates the formal repetition of rhymes within individual poetic patterns. While investigating why the rules matter, the content of the poem was disregarded and I dealt with the rules solely with the particular rhymes within individual poetic patterns. The repetition of the end-rhymes was the key in the sound work. The work begins with the entire poem then broken down as rhymes start repeating. Towards the second half of the work, with the pace speeded up, words lost their meaning and in this isolated sonic space, all one can hear are repetitive sound/rhythmic patterns.
Note: The Sad Zither [锦瑟], 2021, Sound Installation, 11min30sec. It is based on the poem by Li Shangyin (李商隐, Tang Dynasty, a.d.813-858).
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Design of the end-rhyme repetition in the sound tracks for The Sad Zither, 2021, Ling Liu.
2. Visual-sound space for Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm, 2022, Ling Liu.
3. Sound space for Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm, 2022, Ling Liu.
4. Sound clip for The Sad Zither, 2022, Ling Liu.
LINK TO - Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm
As we look back into Chinese history, where the sound of language can only be represented as words in poetry, the relationship between sound and visual can be understood as the connection between words and images. Poetry, calligraphy and painting, as three representational art forms in pre-modern China, formed an integrated artistic form within the context of Chinese lyric aesthetics. This ultimate integration means words and images no longer exist without each other. This intricate situation stands as a significant inspiration related both to history and the issue of sound and visual in contemporary Chinese artistic practice.
Aesthetics can be understood as the fundamental artistic principles or rules that underlying the creation of art. In this particular project, the rhythmic rules are the basic principles,
sound and visual works are the vivid expressive interpretations to accompany the fundamental logic. In Bring in the Wine[将进酒], the drawings show the sound patterns in the vocal performance of the poetry, and the act of drawing joins in the acoustics as layers of ‘noise’. The sound work itself become integrated acoustic layers of vocal and visual
expressions. Meanwhile, the paintings become the rhythmic drawings of painted sonic gestures, which once again represents the rhythm of the language in the vocal expressions. Altogether, this is a sonic-visual performance work as the representation of linguistic rhythmic rules, as well as an experiment dealing with the creativity of contemporary
integrated artistic forms in the context of Chinese lyric aesthetics.
Note: Bring in the Wine [将进酒], 2022, Sound Installation, 20min33sec. It is based on the poem by Li Bai (李白, Tang Dynasty, a.d.701-762).
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Design of sound track for Bring in the Wine, 2022, Ling Liu.
2. Painting detail for Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm II, 2023, Ling Liu.
3. Exhibition layout for Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm II, 2023, Ling Liu.
LINK TO - Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm II
<< Barb Macek
Being a writer and artist-scientist it was obvious for me to (also) use language as a resource for my artistic research on the margins of medicine and philosophy. In the course of my PhD project as a research fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences I developed poetry-based practices to broaden the horizon of our – mainly biomedically informed – understanding of autoimmunity.
The framework of my explorations hereto is provided by German romanticism and its main theory, the „progressive universal poetry”, formulated by poet-scientist Novalis and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel. It intends to link all artistic and scientific disciplines, ascribing them equal importance for our understanding of the world. A main notion within its concept is indicated by the adjective „progressive”, stating that all worldly processes are in the becoming and never finished.
Especially Novalis’ thoughts on „poetizing” as part of the universal poetry turned out to be valuable to find a new access to the mystery of autoimmunity. Employed on bodily processes a different understanding of clinical symptoms is facilitated by seeing them as signs of an ongoing transformation. The interpretation of these signs again takes place on the level of language: In reverse conclusion from Wittgenstein’s renowned definition of the limits of the world by the limits of our language, I state that by expanding the limits of language, we, at the same time and to the same extent, expand our world.
This is exactly what poetry does, and what makes it a unique tool for artistic research.
The technique „EEE – Exercises in Existential Eccentricity ” engages the autoimmune body of the investigator within the framework of Plessner’s philosophical anthropology and his concept of existential positionality. It is a variation of self-interviewing as part of autoethnographic practices and can be summarized as an exercise in embodied diversity within oneself.
The structure of the technique is provided by a set of questions, organized along categories that were derived from gathered materials connected to the personal history of illness (diary notes, images), and labeled with keywords like „symptom description”, „emotional resonance”, „cognitive evaluation”, and „meaning ascription”.
Practicing the EEE also means the involvement of objects (medical aids, masks, pictures, etc.) referred to as artefacts (see for example Image 2) or souvenirs of the illness journey that are not only used to guide the narrative along certain motives but also to elicit different voices of the self and engage them in an intense dialogue.
The aspect of existential positionality is realized by varying psychophysical parameters that supposedly affect the self-distance or self-reflexivity (like being in pain, or in the transitional state of half-asleep/half-awake) from exercise to exercise.
Finally, the protocols of the EEE-performances, including remarks on the specific situation and the involved materials, are transferred into a lyrical form by means of poetic transcription. The poetic form is intended to expand our apprehension of autoimmunity in the direction of understanding it as a variation of the conditio humana, and to provide new images to help people cope with autoimmune diseases.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. EEE-Artefacts: Pain Transcript 2, Barb Macek, 2020.
LINK TO – article Exercises in Existential Eccentricity
LINK TO – video EEE-Trials: Movements, Artefacts, Transitions
The Poetical Anamnesis / PA is a language-based technique I developed to investigate the existential dimension of autoimmune diseases. It conceptualizes the autoimmune body as a modified and therefore poetic body. The symptoms of an autoimmune disease are read as signs of a starting transformation of an organism into a poetical means of world modification. The background for this understanding is provided by Novalis, who postulated that the poetic process of creation in its last consequence means to transform the body and its organs into tools of world creation and world modification.
The goal of the PA is to interpret the signs of change, of transformation (i.e. the symptoms), expressed by the patient, in regard to the world and the status of its carrier. It is about capturing the body poem, translating it and reconstructing it as transforming serial poetry.
The practical part of the PA consists in editing processes deployed on the transcripts of anamnesis interviews. It is based on poetological principles, like on the formal rules of a specific verse form, or on a specific rhythm triggered by the words / syllables that were randomly selected.
The end result of the application of these principles is a lyrical series: With every new poem the patient is created as a transient poetical formation; new information emerges and becomes comprehensible, and the ideal result is a gain of meaning on all sides – on the aesthetic as well as on the medical and the personal side.
CREDITS
1. ‘PA – Poetical Anamnesis, Renga 1-6’, text & voice: Barb Macek, 2022.
Drawing on the understanding of space through embodied memories and over a methodology that includes archival research, story-telling, human relations and visual arts, Mythical Truths (2022 - 2023) envisions an alternative school model where decision making occurs on the authority of its own people. Students, professors, technicians, models, administrative personnel and others that constitute the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, are invited to share memories or their future aspirations as they walk through and around the school buildings. Their stories are recorded in an archive and gain momentum through their sculptural and sound translation in space. This way a polyphonic landscape is created where personal truths and collective myths shape the identity of the institution.
The final outcome of the proposed artistic research addresses how an archive of untold stories, when activated through art, can become a method that privileges pluralism and inspires change. Mythical Truths stems from my necessity to look into the Academy as an educational and cultural system where my vision of sculpture and archiving can amplify or sustain its social diversity.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1.- 4. Mythical Truths, translation of oral stories to sculptures, within the spaces of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.
The interdisciplinary research project Tell Me (2021) is inspired by the geophysical landscape of Patras (the third largest city in Greece) and from the contemporary action of the city's working class. It analyses their discourse, visually documents individual memory and aims to create a literate and sculptural environment that promotes public dialogue and highlights language as an artistic medium. During the research process various topics are introduced; the value of scale as a means of understanding the urban landscape, the relationship between individual memory and collective truth, how individual myths shape collectively communities and cities and finally, how the public domain is being formed through the translation of language to mass. Tell Me is making an attempt to provide an account and – both artistically and in a semiotic way – overturn the post-industrial landscape of Patras by recalling and converting individual and collective memories which have shaped the modern city.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1 - 4. Documentation from the language-based sculptures in three different areas in the city of Patras (GR).
<< Yorgos Maraziotis
My multidisciplinary practice focuses on conceptual processes that question domesticity, contemporary habitations and human relations. Apart from using common materials of the plastic arts, for the past five years, I have been introducing language and dialogue as my primary mediums for studying the historical, cultural and architectural identity of public domains and institutions (schools, museums, etc). My methodology relies on walking and real-life story-telling with the people that constitute the above mentioned subjects. Through the combination of social sculpture, archiving and institutional critique, my aim is to use language as the main tool for sustaining or amplifying pluralism in collective landscapes.
My current artistic research Mythical Truths, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, or the research projects Tell Me (2021) and Exiting (2020), that were completed in Greece in collaboration with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and various social organisations, raise questions on the relation between personal and collective truth, the physiognomy of the archive as a “living-together” space and the embodiment of memory as an ever-changing agent.
Kinetic audiobook is an experimental performance form, where audio literature as an emergent form of cultural production becomes an object of critical observation, which is deconstructed in and through performance.
Concept originated from the process of research performance Manuaali (virate.me 2022). This work was constructed as series of multiple corporeal, linguistic and technological transmutations happening at different levels:
1. A written narrative was studio recorded as audiobook and divided into short samples;
2. Composer created a graphic notation, in which each sample of the narrative has a designated hand movement;
3. In the performance, performer follows the graphic score and performs different hand movements;
4. Performer’s movements are scanned by a virtual hand-tracking sensor which is connected to a granular synthesizer. When a movement is recognised, sensor triggers speech sample, which is modified sonically by granular synthesizer according to hand gestures, pauses and rhythm of the performer;
5. Algorithmic translation application translates granulated Finnish into English subtitles, which brings the serendipity of meanings into play and also acts as the textual subconsciousness of the performance producing constant slips and glitches.
Together these operations form a heterogeneous linguistic space where the ordinary processes of signification are interrupted. This reflects Viktor Sklovsky’s idea of poetry as “a complicated way of speaking” that prolongs the moment of perception. While extratextual writing through sound technological tools may be based on automated processing, on the other level it disrupts the automation of reception and forces listeners to create new strategies for making sense of what they perceive.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Manuaali, video version (2023)
Text, dramaturgy, voice: Klaus Maunuksela
Composition, sound design, performing: Walter Sallinen
Visuals and coding: Ville Niemi
Cinematography: Pauli Tapola
Supported by: Performing Arts Research Center, University of Arts Helsinki
<< Klaus Maunuksela
As a dramaturg, researcher and writer working with sound technology, I’ve been interested in sound technological appliances as possible tools for writing.
Recording, sound modification, speech synthesis and spatial sound systems are often applied as tools for making music. Yet they could also be approached as “writing machines” for extratextual writing practices that aim at exploring writing, reading and listening as sensory meaning-making beside – and beyond – carving and interpreting of graphic signs.
Beside textual practices, I’ve found it appealing to work as a writer through the practice of recording and listening to my own reading voice. This works as a way of distancing myself from the text-in-progress and opens up a question of self-affection as an artistic method to be consciously studied. Simultaneity of roles as writer, reader and listener seems to act as a mise-en-scène of the schizoid process of writing, where the multiplicity of inner voices is trying to surface in the act of writing.
Beyond textual practices: Sound technological tools make it possible to perceive human voice as masses, clouds or streams that are constantly reworked through iteration, computational permutations and recursive loops. Language unveils in the vibratory materiality of voices that are no longer identifiable, which expands the scope of virtual subjectivities present in speech. My critical interest lies in the potential that these kinds of writing tools have for approaching the experience of language in the transindividual and presubjective level, where writing, reading, speaking and listening continuously intertwine.
<< Annie Morrad
My art practice emerges from combining various art genres to evidence inter-species connections as artworks. These uses of art language sit outside ‘wildlife documentation’ photography or video. This language is initiated through live performance gesture, photo and video visuals, sound and questions on how non-human sound can be utilised to communicate meanings.
I discovered that as part of the processes used in making my artworks, a unique language was formed that created interactive communication between the non-human species and myself. One that engaged in visual and sound gestures between us. Although not a final outcome in itself, this became a vital aspect in the making of the final artworks.
As part of engaging with species equality, this artwork considered how non-human species and human species can co-produce visual language. Pacifically in this artwork through physical contact. Also, ‘Jump Co’ introduces field recorded sound as a vehicle to enhance the visual movement. Thereby bringing other species' sound into the language framework and producing a cohesive ‘voice’.
Night_Sound explores a combination of different languages; visual video close-up, edited field recordings, discoordinated sound and music based on western understanding. Through both disrupting the sound and image surface and juxtaposing this with a known language (music) the artwork endeavours to produce a shift in language that provides the receiver with individual interpretations.
<< Amelie Mourgue d'Algue
Founded in 2020 by artist Amélie Mourgue d’Algue and curator Sarina Basta, the bureau des heures invisibles (bhi) is an artistic research collective based in Aubervilliers, in the outskirts of Paris. Named after an installation created in 2008 by Amélie Mourgue d’Algue, the bhi is structured as a non-for-profit organization which explores locally processes of "living together", and "making common". The bhi supports hybrid cultural practices shifting between visual arts, writing, performance and pedagogy that promote different forms of knowledge production and sharing, untethering it from the expectations of institutional reference and canonical frames.
The organization supports regional, national and international programs related to the plurality of languages and collaborative processes in artistic production. It fosters approaches grounded in orality, translation, attunement and conversation as paths to create art together.
In the spring of 2022, the bhi co-developed the Laboratory of the Ensemble Plurilingue as an initiative of artists, musicians and people based in Aubervilliers, Greater Paris and beyond.
Practitioners of all disciplines are invited to enrich and diversify our habitual modes of address and forms of public speaking: invocation, song, dance, "asko" and "achewiqs" are some of the plural forms of public address the bhi co-explores through workshops held on tuesdays afternoon at the Aquarium in Aubervilliers.
On Tuesday mornings, the Laboratory of the Ensemble Plurilingue proposes courses of French as a foreign language to women from the neighborhood, researching learning methods valorising the first languages of participants and using artistic mediation as a method to encourage the participants to talk to one another.
At the heart of this project, initiated in 2015 by artist Amélie Mourgue d’Algue, and presented at the 2016 SAR Conference Writing as a practice, Practice as writing, is the process of translation. Plurality of Languages is an ongoing project that experiments with the immersive encounter with languages to be experienced as an oscillation between thing and sign, between noise and sound through the reading of translations of ‘Pluralität der Sprachen’, an entry dated November 1950 in Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch published in 2003 by Pieper Verlag.
The bhi holds the repository of personal and spontaneous translations from the original German and often translations of translations, collected over the years by artist Amélie Mourgue d’Algue from contributors engaged in the project. Translations are currently available in Arabic, Bambara, Chinese (Mandarin), Corean, Criolo (Cap Verde), Mauritius Creole (Mauritius), Dutch, English, Farsi, French, Frioulan, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Kabyle, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian and Spanish. These translations form the score for performances where they are read out loud in arrangements that are created for each situation.
Members of the Ensemble Plurilingue produced performances of Plurality of Languages at Unesco and the Institut Culturel du Mexique, in Paris in 2021 and at the Goethe Institut, Paris in 2022.
Members of the Ensemble Plurilingue, Goethe Institut, 10 June 2022:
Sarina Basta (English), Rosa Djaber (Kabyle), Gonçalo Ducla Soares (Portuguese), Lena Gousseva (Russian), Julieta Hanono (Spanish), Françoise Khoury (Arabic), Ralph Mahfoud (Libanese), Amélie Mourgue d’Algue (French), Guslagie Malanda (French), Jafar Rezai (Farsi), Tabibeh Rezaei (Farsi), Noga Sivan (Hebrew), Sunnyboy (Capverdian creole), Jutta Wernicke (German) et Yiling Yang (Chinese).
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Pluralité des Langues, Livret Nuit de la Philosophie 2022, pp.10-11. Amélie Mourgue d'Algue.
2. Pluralité des Langues, Extracts of the performance at the Goethe Institut.
Attunement is the process through which we form relationships. When we attune with others we allow our own internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships.
Holding the thought of inhabiting a space through singing and turning it into a territory composed through the multiplicity of the songs that share it, artist Amélie Mourgue d’Algue invited artists, comedians, singers and musicians, professional and semi-professional, living and engaging with the soundscape of Aubervilliers, a world-city where more than a hundred languages are spoken, to produce a new composition of the Ensemble Plurilingue.
Taking as a starting point ‘À la Volette’, a French 17th century ritornello, translating and adapting it in their chosen languages, the participants performed songs and texts belonging to their cultural heritage, written, found, translated or transformed, responding to the musical calls of one another in an attunement process renewed at each stage of the development of the project.
Members of the Ensemble Plurilingue for Habiter en Oiseau:
Ornella Bonventre, Jawid Ghani, Julieta Hanono, Ralph Mafhoud, Amélie Mourgue d'Algue, Nadia Saït, Mireille Rivat and Sunnyboy with the support of Sarina Basta
CREDITS
1. Superposition of Untitled, Ralph Mafhoud after the first couplet of À la Volette, 17th century French ritournelle, 2022, with Untitled, Amélie Mourgue d'Algue, collage, 2022
2. Extract of the sound recording of Habiter en Oiseau
Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind wonders “whether thinking and other invisible and soundless mental activities are meant to appear or whether in fact they can never find an adequate home in the world” (1978, p. 23). Gertrude Stein sees streams of consciousness as a tool that can transform reality. Lyn Hejinian states that one is always “thinking about reality” as “reality is all there is” (2000, p. 8). Influenced by those ideas, in my artistic research, I position the appearance of thinking and specifically the stream of thought, as a crucial element in the production of autotheory.
I am intrigued by art forms that suggest an intersection between art and theory, such as the performance lecture. My first exploration of the medium was my master’s graduation work i like the longer version more than love and anarchy. During this solo piece, I talk and write simultaneously and nonstop for 45 minutes. The written text, which I type on the laptop, is projected behind me, and my voice is amplified by a microphone. In this iteration of nonstop languaging, the gaps between words do not exceed the milliseconds a breath lasts or the millimetres of blank space between digitally written letters. The result is an overload of words, thoughts, citations, experiences, lyrics, theories, and memories, all seeking their own linearity. Although fragments of the text refer to events of the past, the performance intends to be an articulation of the continuous present in the ephemeral encounter between performer and spectator.
Arendt, H., 1978. The Life of the Mind. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc.
Hejinian, L., 2000. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. – 3. Antrianna Moutoula, I like the longer version more than love and anarchy# 3. Photographs by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
LINK TO – I like the longer version …
<< Antrianna Moutoula
Primarily language-based, my artistic research spans performance, film, radio, and writing. At the core of my approach are the elements of liveness and performativity. Even when the outcome is a film or an article, my process is always situated in the ephemeral encounter between performer and spectator.
While being a part of artistic academic spaces, I noticed a gap between the language of my practice and the language that was requested by the academic framework. More than that, I often experienced the inadequacies of what is considered the suitable language for critical discourse, to host modes of thinking that can be identified as “a woman writing herself” (Cixous,1976). I became familiar with a lineage of feminist approaches towards language and knowledge production, specifically fields within visual art that merge the personal with the theoretical (e.g. autotheory).
In 2020, I developed the autotheoretical performance practice of nonstop languaging. Nonstop languaging is the method of tracing my stream of thought through language in real time, by simultaneously talking and writing nonstop in front of an audience. I perform autotheory by merging methods of articulating autobiography (carrying the self in language) with methods of forming and digesting theory. My practice offers an expanded view on the structure and linearity of language. I approach academic language as a confined space and propose ways of mapping and reworking its boundaries. By engaging with nonstop languaging in different contexts, I aim to contribute to a renegotiation of the confinements of knowledge production within artistic academic discourse.
Cixous, H., 1976. The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs, 1(4), pp. 875-893.
LINK TO - Antrianna Moutoula’s website:
While researching autobiography, I came across the notion of the necessary other (Cavarero, 2000). Cavarero’s theory suggests that the perspective of the singular self is incapable of containing the reality of one’s life, a reality which is always dependent on the presence of a witness. The necessary other became an indispensable parameter in my practice, and the reason that since 2021, I perform nonstop languaging as a biweekly radio performance at Radio WORM (NL). I approach my time on the radio as a studio practice, a place to develop my research further and test new methods of autotheory.
I often integrate my radio practice into other mediums. An example is my short film not everything inside of you is yours. Framed as a video essay, the work combines recordings of my family’s everydayness with fragments of Cixous’ Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.
Another example is my article for the Special Issue of the Arts Journal: Autotheory in Contemporary Visual Arts Practice (2022). The main text was created during a series of radio performances, with a focus on methods of transcription and citation. Although there were compromises that needed to be made for the practice of nonstop languaging to appear in this context, during the process I was given more space to follow my own parameters than the first time I disseminated this research (MA dissertation). The experience enforced my belief that through a critical mass of works that merge the personal with the theoretical, that foreground different linearities, and shape an audience of engaged listeners, the confinements of knowledge production and dissemination within artistic academic discourse can be renegotiated.
Cavarero, A., 2000. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. London: Routledge.
Moutoula, A., 2022. Unclogging the Ears: Nonstop Languaging as Autotheory in Art and Academia. Arts 11: 114.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Antrianna Moutoula, not everything inside of your is yours, audio excerpt.
2. Antrianna Moutoula, documentation from the radio performance.
3. Postcard, text.
LINK TO – article ‘Unclogging the Ears’
LINK TO – trailer for not everything inside of you is yours
GLOSSOLALALARARIUM PANDEMICONIUM: A MEANINGFULLY IRREVERENT, QUEERELOUSLY AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC ESSAMBLAGE FOR TRYING TIMES
If there was any throughline to COVID-19, it lay within a narrative of capriciousness. To explore the paradox of the pandemic as proliferation meets obliteration, I alternate randomization with redaction within a riotous essamblage combining essayistic principles of “prepositional thinking” with bricolage. Neologisms meet textracts of responses to the 21 prompts of the Massive and Micro experiment. Glossolalalararium Pandemiconium comes with a helping of “lala” in a froth of babble, doubt, rage, and whimsy. It is a textual grappling with the shock and awe of the everyday, girded by a notion of “meaningful irreverence” that underpins my current research.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Page from Glossolalalararium Pandemiconium
LINK TO - Glossolalalararium Pandemiconium
<< Peta Murray
“I am a performance. My words and my world are a performance of difference and sameness, of liveness and dyingness, of hereness and thereness.” (Harris and Holman Jones, 2019)
I am an erstwhile playwright turned self-proclaimed paracademic. The core of my language-based research is the materialities of the textual, and the hybridisations of forms. I am compulsively committed to w(h)o(a)rding as a durational and vow-based practice, and I seek to amass, compile, aggregate, array and cluster, stockpile, and accrete language and to repurpose it in speech acts of playful resistance. Through neologistic practices, collaborative writing, diarology, cunninglinguistic excesses and other mechanisms, I set out to un-discipline words. I tinker with raw materials, typefacery and fontistry, and syllabic components, phonic and sonic, of vocabulary in quest of ways to alter my own awareness and think queerly. Harnessing a prefix here or a suffix there, buffing or bludgeoning, sanding or sandwiching parts of speech into unseemly shapes, revitalising obscure words, learning once-threatened languages, recuperating forgotten phrases, these gestures are underpinned by a commitment to lexical play and linguistic pleasure, whereby I may skirt the conventions of disciplinarity and let language loose.