Voz Rara Rara Rara is an artist’s research-driven workshop on other political genealogies of voice and listening. It is directed at art workers, activists, students, academics, or any person interested, studying or working with the politics of voice and listening, particularly in relation to technology, body, gender or ‘disabilities’.
During the workshop we worked with texts, audiovisual documents and materials drawn from the practices of artists, theorists and activists including Amanda Baggs, Amanda Weidman, Anne Carson, Boris Fridman Mintz, Jonathan Ree, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Occupy Wall Street, Jérôme Bel or Yes We Fuck among others. We explored synthetic voices, deaf cultures and sign languages, gender and the body and politics of the voice and listening. Specific case-studies such as the masculinisation of Thatcher’s voice, Bell Lab’s Voice Operator Demonstrator, and the ‘listened voice’ of the Tojolabal people within the Zapatista movement were examined.
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30 November, 7pm
performance in Minerva Works
‘There are none so deaf’ is a performed reading of a text of the same name, to be published later this year by Q-O2 and Errant Bodies. The text takes its title from a cartoon by Gonzalo Rocha in which the voice of Zapatista Comandanta Esther, at the Mexican Congress, is represented as the plump body of a speech scroll. The cartoon is used as the starting point of a genealogy that goes through deaf culture and sign languages, synthetic voices, the phonograph and the telephone, to present another possible genealogy of the politics of voice and listening.
This event was part of VOZ RARA curated by Grand Union Curators-in-Residence Anna Santomauro and Valerio Del Baglivo.
For other events please see:
October 7, 3pm
SABEL GAVALDON
To strike a pose is to pose a threat
talk at Grand Union
September 28, 2–6 pm
HAMISH MACPHERSON
Improvising Politics: Out of Touch
workshop at Grand Union
November 2-4
ALEX MARTINIS ROE
Our Future Network: Workshop on Practices of Alliance
workshop – venue tbc
February 2018
MIKHAIL KARIKIS
Vocal Terrains: sound, collectivity and labour
a screening of Karikis’s films and a performance lecture at Birmingham University
May 2018
KATARINA ZDJELAR
Between the sounds
a screening of Zdjelar’s films at Birmingham City University