Let's amplify unspeakable things

overlayered utterances

About

'Amplified Utterances' is an online platform that supports a space for exploration and research, regarding voice in public and its amplification, developed by Angeliki Diakrousi. It consists of a set of experiments that questions the establishment of authoritative/male voices that create exclusive speech platforms, along the assumption that voices have to be rational, authoritative (voice of expertise) etc. The intervention that changes the paradigm becomes
a set of podcasts
what conflicts or frictions the technical aspect provokes?
that revisit an archive of audio recordings produced in situated meetings and soundwalks. Every podcast exists on a way that creates repetetive layers of the same material. I perceive amplification as a way to create presence through repetition and multiplication. 'Amplified Utterances' is upsetting binaries such as male/female, expert/amateur, rational/irrational. It is about creating poetic (audio) narratives emerging from the contribution of people.
this is how female/high-pitched voices have been described since acient times as Anne Carson observes

Podcasts

Podcast is a series of episodes of moments of an online audio archive overlayered by my voice as a narrator.

Let's Talk About Unspeakable Things

Thesis

Amplification of female voices

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.

Diary of West Rotterdam

I recorded sounds from West Rotterdam,

while walking around a neighborhood


for several days. This action was part of my first experiments when I was in attempt to understand how gender binaries regarding voice are reflected in space, especially public space.

player

Audio collection