And the worst thing is you do it to yourself / Desire notes / Hotel room notes / Lament / People assume I’m an only child / Practical Masochism / Tempest: an epilogue /
Lament / stills from an improvised vocal performance / 4:00 / Croatia / 2012
Through an explicitly gendered and unmediated voice, Lament seeks to articulate without words. The sound spills over and beyond itself, it layers, it exceeds, it is messy. Despite being intuitive Lament nods to the enduring tradition of suppressing the sounds of women. In Anne Carson’s essay ‘The Gender of Sound’ she writes extensively about the notion that women are unable to regulate the sounds they expel, that their noises and chatter are not guided by sense and reason. These suppositions may be rooted in classical antiquity yet the categorisation and dismissal of the sounds and voices of women is still undoubtedly prevalent. Through abstract vocalisation there is the potential to create words, worlds, sounds and expressions not yet accounted for by the existing limits of patriarchal knowledge structures. To hear this guttural, glossolalic sound is to encounter loss, hysteria and perhaps optimism.
Screened at Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic, Zagreb, Gem Space and Centre for Recent Drawing, London
Streaming link here