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.
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,
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.
