7.0 KiB
Title
- Voluminous bodies
- The volume of female voices
- Knowing and inhabiting with your voice
- Amplifying a collective female voice
- The sounds of
- feminism
- Amplified voices
- Embodied streaming/amplification
Research question: How voice occupies space and reveals dark aspects that (its mediation) can be anything else than harmful for the establishment of a democratic society.
Introduction
The last years my ongoing concern lies on the presence of the female voice in public. During my previous studies I gradually realized how my gendered body had been silenced or marginalized through slight gestures from male figures or institutional powers that were obfuscating this situation. Observing, as well, female members of my family, female teachers, workers and immigrant neighbors of my early age environment I found out different types of marginalization and silencing. Examples would be women working at home or the background of a family, taking care of everything in and leaving behind their own desires, men interrupting them when articulating arguments in a political/formal dialogue, underestimating their knowledge. The mediation of their voices and the way they were becoming present, active participants and visible in public spaces and spheres became one of my main interests. My past projects reflected and responded to that concern. I worked with voice and sound. As forms of art are underestimated in the context of the western visual culture. They are forms connected to irrational attitudes and primary oral cultures. The sound of voices reveals hidden suppressed aspects and subjects of the society. Because of its temporariness, non-linearity, invisibility and borderless character long sounds text sound can exist and transit in multiple dimensions of spaces at the same time, creating bonds between them. Oral cultures of all times, that are based on vocal expression, differ from the literate cultures in that they embrace the collective sharing of knowledge. More specifically they create "personality structures that in certain ways are more communal and externalized, and less introspective than those common among literates" (Ong, 2002, pg. 67). Feminists have been including and embracing voice in their practices because there is a uniqueness in it that embodies the speakers and their personal stories while connecting the ones being present. Together with this concern I was also dealing with the separation of amateur and expert when I was approaching telecommunication networks and technologies with the intention of learning to build and use them. This separation goes together with the gender exclusion. I quickly found out that this is not my personal problem. In the example of an activist collective, called Prometheus, volunteers expressed similar concerns in the barnraising of a radio station:
"The radio activists presented the work of soldering a transmitter, tuning an antenna, and producing a news program or governing a radio station to be accessible to all. Nevertheless, they were conscious of patterned gaps in their organization and volunteer base: men were more likely than women to know how to build electronics, to be excited by tinkering, and to have the know-how to teach neophytes.This troubled the activists"(Dunbar-Hester, pg. 53-54).
In one of my projects, Sound Acts in Victoria Square I 'inserted' the recorded sounds of women’s voices into existing conversations at a public square in Athens that was male dominated. Most of the frequenters were immigrants and refugees from different periods of migration to Greece. They were coming from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Albania, Georgia, Russia and others besides Greece. The gender bias and the way they used the public space differed according to their country of origin. However it was common that many of the young women visiting the square were just passengers with shopping bags or kids around them. The men, on the other hand, were hanging out with their friends, occupying many spots of the square for hours. My intervention was like that; first, I realized and recorded actions of conversations, within two months, with women I met in the square, as well as archived and ordered the collected material. Then I planned and realized the in-situ broadcasting of the collected sound material and directed the new relations and conversations with the public for one day in June 2015. The intervention lasted for some hours and different people, mostly men, were participating in conversations that would include the women's voices or not. Their voices came from a past time of the same place, when they were physically present. At another time only their words were there and 'participated'. From my description of the project: "The broadcasted female voices were abruptly intervening into the existing conversations in the specific places, giving the impression of an non-invited 'absent' guest" (Diakrousi, 2015, pg. ). They were distant voices. I and the speaker were mediating them in the current public.
My ongoing research after that lead me to the public forums and public speeches and the technologies that facilitate them, always with a feminist perspective. This thesis is a series of 5 essays which relate to the female and collective voice and its mediation. They address the voice as a feminist tool for communicating and an object of presence and inhabiting space. Historically, some modes of addressing have been marginalized and shut out of the public domain (see the monstrosity of female voice). The separation between private and public space has played an important role in that as it reflects and it is related to the gender separation. The collective voice is marginalized under the realm of the patriarchal individualistic society. The female voice is part of it. The texts deal particularly with the voice as a medium for collective practices (see the monstrosity...). This collective vocalization affords the amplification and multiplication either with the aid of technology or embodied practices (see Multiplication vis a vis amplification) that refuses the dominant ways of establishing presence and dialogue. In the patriarchal democracy there is a fear of ugly forms of address which are connected to the female body- blood, birth, death, mourning &c- and other dark aspects and passions that are perceived as threat for the society. These are forms of vocalization that are excluded public discourse which centers on “self-control” and “reason”. Such things are creating noise and disorder and "have to be kept" silent according to the patriarchal norms. But alternative mediums and forms of communication have been developed against that (see transmitting ugly things). There are technologies for self-control and filtration. The men are taught to disport themselves in particular ways and they are taught to teach the women to be silent. In the current era we see how technologies serve to filter forms of collective voices; again this aims to reduce “noise” and thus to exclude (see Let’s talk about unspeakable things).