Let's amplify unspeakable things

overlayered utterances

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.

This thesis is a series of three essays which relate to female and collective voices, and their mediation. They address the voice as a feminist tool for communication; studying how the female voice creates conditions for forms of listening and making space. Historically, some modes of address have been marginalized and shut out of the public domain. Collective voices are marginalized under the realm of patriarchal individualistic society. Even though voice is a medium for collective practice it is situated in a context that tends towards social binary structures and oppositions that restrict its possibilities. These binaries, which favor the 'civilized white male' subjectivities, have held influence on Western thinking since antiquity. Nevertheless, the nature of voice and its mediation overpass oppositions of gender, nationality, culture, space, technology and power relations. My research seeks to unravel these political capabilities of voices, in order to explore democratic ways of communication that embrace excluded forms of address.

Part of the project is a series of meetings/workshops I am organising together with Christina Karagianni. Our intentions come from personal experiences and we seek to explore the silencing of excluded voices, and go beyond their barriers. 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, an open library that I consider a diverse public space. How can we engage politically with the exclusion of specific voices from the public sphere? Here I have documented our attempts. 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. 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. The produced material is being included in an audio archive, the player.

I recorded sounds from the West Rotterdam, Leeszaal 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.

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.

'Let's amplify unspeakable things' 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 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. 'Let's amplify unspeakable things' is upsetting binaries such as male/female, expert/amateur, rational/irrational. It is about creating poetic (audio) narratives emerging from the contribution of people.