Where Am I Speaking From

– ongoing project –

Video-Sound-Installation, 2021

Where Am I Speaking From is an on-going research on the sound qualities and possible modifications of the voice. The audio-visual installation shows a slowly morphing texture that is projected on an organic sculptural surface. In a repetitive pattern, voice fragments are slowly transform into a composition. The video becomes the voice – a new being. Breathing and getting in dialogue with audio. When we speak of the voice, we speak of timbre, tone, pitch. We try to visualize the sounds that are produced by notes. The language of the tonal part of the voice. How can the voice be embodied? And isn’t the voice already a body? Can a voice be bodyless? What is the voice but sound in a space? And what is a voice without a body? 

The sound of breathing is already a voice, the unique sound of one individual. It is not about speaking, not about meaning or communication. It is about the quality of the voice itself, the scratching of a breaking voice, the heavy breathing, and the in-between of the words. The uneducated voice aside from singing. The voice as rhythm. The voice as a noise. One could think of the “grain” as described by Roland Barthes as the friction between voice as something in between speech, sound and noise. What qualities can be evoked; what body is imagined?

“[…] the ‘disembodied voice’, the ‘voice object,’ and the primary ventriloquism of voicing often espoused is never the whole story: it is my view that the voice is also a full body, always already a voice subject, rich with intentions and meanings; sexed and gendered, classed and raced, accented, situated, and inflected by the intensities of numerous markings and their performances (inscriptions, erasures, recitls,…)” – Brandon LaBelle