METHOD
On the two laboratory sessions of January 2025, led by guests (visual artist) Maud van der Beuken and (voice artist) Stephanie Pan, we focused on the presence of the Nieuwe Maas, the river around which Rotterdam has unfolded itself. While exploring the limitations of our voices, breathing and the sounds of our body, we sought a language amplifying the river’s presence, that looked beyond the confines of words.
Methods included originally written River Meditations, inspired by Pauline Oliveros' Sonic Meditations, to attune to the river. Sonic Poems explored meaning-making through vocal sound, searching for a new lexicon. Vocal experimentation was supported by an extended vocal technique toolbox introduced by Stephanie Pan.
The sessions were hosted at Buitenplaats Brienenoord and Batavierhuis in Rotterdam.
THEORY
Voice and language are entangled, yet voice extends beyond the boundaries of linguistic systems. As a carrier of meaning, voice is not only shaped by language but also holds a surplus that resists being fully captured by words. The timbre, breath, and vibration of voice convey affective intensities that disrupt the fixed structures of signification. To explore this extralinguistic dimension is to open up the possibility of creating meaning in ways that exceed and challenge dominant frameworks of knowledge.
Hydrofeminism, as articulated by Astrida Neimanis, offers a compelling lens through which to consider this fluid potential. If bodies are water-bodies—porous, leaky, and interconnected—then meaning too might flow, seep, and merge across boundaries. Rivers, oceans, and rain carry histories of colonial violence, climate change, and reproductive struggles, but they also carry the promise of alternative relations. What if human voices did not speak for these watery bodies, but rather listened and resonated with them? To approach voice as vibration rather than fixed signification is to attune to a mode of communication that amplifies rather than translates, allowing the world to speak in its own polyphonic rhythms.
Philosophers like Alice Lagaay emphasize that the human voice originates in the prelinguistic realm of noise and babble—a realm where meaning is not yet bound by the symbolic order. This primal aspect of voice continues to reverberate beneath the surface of language, surfacing in cries, laughter, sighs, or the fractured repetitions of Echo. Adriana Cavarero reminds us that voice, stripped of semantic content, still expresses a singular being-in-the-world. Such vocal expressions resist the logics of representation, offering instead a more immediate, embodied connection.
Julia Kristeva's concept of the semiotic further complicates the relationship between voice and language. The semiotic disrupts the symbolic order by reintroducing the bodily rhythms and impulses that language seeks to regulate. Poetic language becomes a site where the fluid undercurrents of the semiotic resurface, reminding us that voice is always in excess of meaning.
In musicology, Nina Sun Eidsheim highlights how sound and vibration are often sidelined in favor of abstract musical structures. Yet vibration—the felt, resonant movement of sound through bodies—opens up an embodied mode of listening that reorients us toward the physical and relational dimensions of sound. To focus on vibration is to listen not only to what is said, but to how bodies, human and more-than-human, are touched and moved by sound.
If we think of voice as vibration, as a current that moves between bodies and environments, then meaning becomes something fluid—always shifting, always entangled with the material world. This perspective invites us to practice a different kind of listening: one that doesn't seek to translate the world into fixed linguistic categories, but instead amplifies its reverberations. By playing with the extralinguistic dimensions of voice, we might begin to dissolve the boundaries that separate human from nonhuman, self from other, and language from sound. In this watery space of resonance, new forms of meaning and care can emerge—ones that flow beyond the limits of Western vocabularies toward more inclusive, entangled ways of being.
