Where is the emotional weight of a song located? How does it engage in pathos? This is a song that listens, lets the body take over, and moves to a transmutational engagement with what Roland Barthes called the ‘grain’ of the voice, or ‘the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue’.
This work began as a collection of notes made in response to a difficult personal situation. At the same time, I was experimenting with non-verbal vocalisations in connection with an unrelated project. These vocalisations became mentally fused with my notes, and I began thinking of the relationship between them as kind of song.
We often carry songs within us, but here the intention is for the viewer to experience a song from within. The crux of the work is in the relations between voice, text and physical space.
(Stereo excerpt of 4-channel audio)
Installation views from Mountain Song (Master of Voice MA graduation show), Dokzaal, Amsterdam, June 2018