‘the visible world is not a world that interrupts, interferes or surprises […..] it is rather, a stable, immobile, objective world that lies in front of us’
Apass, Brussels, 2012
(Adriana Cavarero, 2008, 37)
Last winter (2012) I undertook a series of practical investigations at an artistic residency in Brussels as part of my practice-based PhD focused on the voice and listening. For this project, sound and particularly the voice are understood as relational tools reflecting the positions of the audience (as listener) and performer (as orator) within the theatrical relationship.
I developed a practice in which I used manmade everyday objects in unusual combinations in order to estrange and defamiliarise habitual conversational conditions. An installation was created from an odd collection of leftover materials far from their habitual function: a baby’s bath, a yoga mat, a shower curtain, an upside down chair faking it as a sound umbrella, a piece of green carpet too small to occupy any room, a broken unzipped sleeping bag. The left overs, like the remnants of a conversation, the bits you are not supposed to listen to – awkward and ugly were deliberately staged and connected to each other through plastic ‘speaking tubes’.
In a performative presentation, I discuss and reveal documentary fragments of the work in order to challenge socially accepted modes of speaking and listening. That which lies above, below and beyond words seems to give away something of our social and political condition thus revealing to each other an essential element of being.
The piece was developed under the generous mentorship of scenographer and musician Sylvain Boisvert in the context of apass – (centre for Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies, Brussels).
