How can we engage politically with the exclusion of specific voices from the public sphere? Here I document my attempts to create a safe common space of trying methods and discussing that topic in Leeszaal, an open library that I consider a diverse public space. I am borrowing methods from feminist groups and protest movements and vocal warming up exercises by Pauline Oliveros. For example, protesters would amplify the speaker's voice by repeating collectively their speech to make their presence visible. Feminists would create safe spaces where women could speak about domestic violence and make a dialogue based on listening. Some methods are vocal performances in situ, the "human microphone", speech acts, listening practices, making podcasts, mediating speech, transform our voices, situated experiments. I am doing that together with Christina Karagianni, who is also from Greece and with whom I share similar experiences of silencing. We combine our practices -her practice lies on choreography and dance and mine on social interaction, voice and sound- and try vocal exercises and reading in moments of Leeszaal.
We invite
how we should approch the gender terminology and false association with voice when inviting people? Should it be about femme sounding? Female voice?
people from Leeszaal and our environment, who find themselves related and interested to this topic. Elements from the meetings: discuss previous material, reading extracts in random order,
discuss
what conflicts or frictions the technical aspect provokes? web-audio, recordings
personal associations and experiences with voice in public, warm up, say a sentence of personal experience in any language, transcribe only the vowels, read back the vowels, read outloud all together the score of vowels, repeat sentences with distorted voice, make podcasts.
The player is an audio collection of voices and sounds from the meetings I have co-organised, references from my research, various internet sources, and soundwalks that I have done. It is a digital utterance that intends to be a reminder to the first forms of excluded female vocal expressions. I am using this material in my podcasts by mixing and overlayering them and creating a form of narrative with my own voice.
Podcast1 "Mediating Speech" is about the amplification of one's voice through another person. It includes series of episodes of the online audio archive of the player, overlayered and commented by my voice as a narrator.
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Protesters in occupy wall street all together repeated the voice of the public speaker in order to amplify their voices. This is called "the human microphone"
parts of the podcasts that you find interesting by repeating or annotate them with your vocal messages. You can listen to the podcasts with headphones and record with any microphone.
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