Voice Day

July 05, 2009
Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, Academieplein 1

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VOICE DAY comprises a series of cross-disciplinary activities at Jan van Eyck Academy, such as concerts, a performance, a lecture, artist talks, discussions, screenings and a one-day exhibition.

VOICE DAY makes visible and audible the work and thinking that happens in the Jan van Eyck as well as outside. It highlights the slippery passages that exist between spoken word and written language. As the voice is situated on the border between language and body, materiality and ephemerality, it serves as a critical site to look at different sorts of remediations and translations, with the social, cultural, historical and political dimensions implied.

More than at conceptual rigor the program aims through a cluster of events at bricklayering a foundation for an ongoing discussion on the voice and its implementation in different practices. The contributions of the participants range from uncanny speech reenactments to more codified practices that conduit the vocal, such as stenography, musical notation and graphics. What resides in the gap that underlies these mediations, scores and scripts, interfaces and typefaces? What potential for performativity, memory and differentiality?

VOICE DAY concludes the group residence  ‘Crash Landing Revisited (and more)’, a research project invested in oral history and reenactment amongst other themes. Prior to VOICE DAY a VOICE WEEK was organized from May 25th – 29th, in conjunction with Christine De Smedt from Les Ballets C de la B, at the Bijloke in Ghent. Whereas VOICE WEEK was set up as an artist’s laboratory and emphasized physical training, exercise and discussion, VOICE DAY is using presentations as the catalyst for encounter. It is a trans-departmental event and involves both researchers, advising researchers from design, theory and fine arts, and artists from outside the Jan van Eyck Academy.

Credits
Facilitator: Myriam Van Imschoot
Assistance: Kristien Van den Brande, Christine De Smedt, An Stevens & the staff of Jan van Eyck.
Thanks to Dominiek Hoens, Koen Brams, Nina Stottrup Larsen, Hans-Christian Dany, Zeljko Blace, Babak Afrassiabi and Avigail Moss for their suggestions and many more researchers for the inspiring talks (and lending their studio).
Special thanks to Imogen Stidworthy for her advice and voice.
Supported by the Jan van Eyck Academie and its Theory, Fine Arts and Design Departments, Sarma and My Other Work.

The research project Crash Landing Revisited (and more) was in residence at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (January – June 2009) and in Kaaitheater in Brussels (December 2007 - April 2008). It is supported by Sarma and WorkSpaceBrussels.

Related activities in Jan van Eyck Academy

• July 4, 2009 (6-11pm): JANVANTASTIC screening program related to Voice Day: India Song by Marguerite Duras & Dead of Night
• July 4, 2009 (4-6pm): reading seminar Lacan: lesson 18 of the Anxiety seminar: La voix de Yahvé.
• July 3, 2009 (7-9pm): Samo Tomsic & Gal Kirn introducing Mladen Dolars untranslated book on prosopopoeia. This book is widely discussing the rethoric figure that consists in lending voice to lifeless objects, but is also concerned with the problematic of direct and/or indirect speech, passing to the discussion of the presence of this rhetoric figure in the history of philosophy, linguistics and psychoanalysis. The presentation will be split into two parts, where speakers will re-read some of the vital sections from the book:
  Gal Kirn 'Politics of prosopopoeia: speaking laws, speaking commodity'
  Samo Tomšič 'Talking masks: prosopopoeia in philosophy and psychoanalysis'

Program details and bios

Artist talk & Shoum, video work by Katarina Zdjelar
• The video piece ‘Shoum’ focuses on an act of translating one’s experience of listening into uttering. A young man in his mid 30’s from Belgrade is firstly writing down and learning the lyrics of ‘Shout’, a song by the band Tears for Fears. Finally he performs the song in what he believes to be the English language. As he doesn’t speak the English language, original words get different “shapes”, as the title of the piece ‘Shoum’ (which is the way he hears the word ‘shout’) suggests. 
Katarina Zdjelar (Belgrade) is an artist based in Rotterdam. Her work focuses on language and belonging, and investigates in specific what happens to subjectivity and to communication in a foreign language, when a mental and physical struggle with language occurs.

Pick up Voices, performance by Myriam Van Imschoot in collaboration with Christine De Smedt
• Pick up Voices  balances on the boundaries of many a register: shadow play, lecture, performance. It seeks to find new ways for alternative history rooted in orality. The source material that constitutes the dramaturgy of this piece derives from interviews on improvisation with artists who once participated in Crash Landing, an interdisciplinary improvisation series in the mid 1990s. Christine De Smedt, who curated Crash Landing (together with Meg Stuart and David Hernandez) replays interview excerpts as if she were a human recording device. She jump cuts through different philosophies and temperaments while channeling the voices of the others through the filter of her own timbre and body. This is the first piece by Myriam Van Imschoot, who accompanies the stories being told, by way of interventions with the overhead projector..
Myriam Van Imschoot specialized in Performance Studies. She is the initiator and founder of Sarma, an artistic and discursive laboratory for criticism, dramaturgy, research and creation in the field of dance and beyond. Her work as a lecturer, writer, dance historian, theoretician, dramaturge and performance maker has given her a broad perspective on the performing arts. Currently she finishes a residence as a guest researcher at The Theory Department at the Jan Van Eyck Academy.
Christine De Smedt is a member of the company Les Ballets C de la B since 1991 and works as a dancer, choreographer and artistic coordinator. She has been realising her own projects, worked for several years with Meg Stuart and recently collaborated with choreographers as Marten Spangberg, Xavier Le Roy, Eszter Salamon, Philipp Gehmacher etc. In collaboration with Meg Stuart and David Hernandez, she initiated and curated the multidisciplinary improvisation project Crash Landing. Pick Up Voices is her first collaboration with Myriam Van Imschoot.

Oh No, video by Jo Huybrechts
• Oh No is a 2' 35" videoloop consisting of an eclectic flow of images, it includes spoken sound fragments of a French speaking real estate agent, and makes an elegiac point of reference by means of a phrase that keeps recurring as a refrain: "Oh no, don' t you die now darling...".
Jo Huybrechts (Brussels) teaches at the film department and postgraduate program 'Transmedia' of Sint-Lukas University College of Art and Design. Since 1983 he made video works. After a few years his work took also a turn towards installation, and he developed spatial audiovisual set-ups and visual works that underwent gradual evolution. The work has been shown in various group exhibitions, one-man shows and other events. From 1994 up to 2001 he was involved in theatre group 'Het Bordes', Brussels.

Untitled, sound piece by Nicolas Matranga
• This piece runs six minutes and twenty-two seconds. Before it was audio it was a text. The text evolved from a yet unfinished thought/project entitled Is There A future In this. Underlying the project is the notion that much of us are mannerist. 
Nicolas Matranga is an artist who is fond of a joke. His works can be mostly read, sometimes seen, sometimes heard, and occasionally a combination of the three. He has spent the past two years working on projects and works that he would rather not make. These works have become part of a series of works entitled Works to be worked. To this date it is unclear if he is an artist.

Out-take 1, 2, 3, by Imogen Stidworthy
• Out-take 1 is the video from the installation ‘I Hate’, which focuses on the speech and photographs of Edward Woodman, a photographer who lost his ability to speak following a cycling accident in 2000. Over the last seven years he has been photographing the huge building site of the new Eurostar terminal at Kings Cross, London. His images reveal the evolving structures and topography of the site in a continual process of demolition and construction. Within the immersive resonance of a large curved sound-wall, Edward’s voice talks through details of these images, which are shown on three flat-screen monitors on a nearby table. Across these screens Edward’s hands move and gesture, supporting his rhythmic, laborious and minimal speech. • In the video we see him working with speech therapist Judith Langley on minute details of pronunciation. In the continual repetition and variation of his delivery, words, their sounds and the linguistic concepts attached to them become dissociated. The evolving forms of speech sounds and meanings echoes, on a micro-scale, the changing architectures of the building site; speech is a very bodily process, with sense and the senses morphing across different terms.
• Out-take 2 is an excerpt from the installation 'Get Here', an audio work composed in 10.2 surround-sound. The piece takes a phrase of local dialect, ‘Scouse’, as a vehicle for reflecting upon broader issues concerning place, voice and subject. • 'Get here!' is commonly heard in Liverpool from mothers calling their children. Like any local accent the sound invokes certain stereotypes and values, positioning the speaker socially, culturally and politically – Scouse is commonly associated with The Beatles, criminality, poverty, humour, militant politics – and being common. Working with people who have very different relationships to the dialect - Scouse women, Somali immigrants, and actresses attempting to produce an ‘authentic’ Scouse accent - Get Here challenges the mechanisms that locate and position the subject, through the voice. In the installation voices emerge unexpectedly from around the space to produce a mobile, unstable and multiple ‘here’, and variations in accent and intonation inflect the words, and the relationship between speaker and listener, with very different meanings.
• Out-take 3 - Topography of a Voice - is another excerpt from the installation 'Get Here'. Topography of a Voice works with differences in pronunciation of the characteristic and uniquely Scouse (Liverpool dialect) phrase, "Get here!" - a local variant of "Come here". • The prints use various forms of visual and textual language to interpret or translate the sounds of several audio examples of the phrase, taken from the audio work Get Here (10.2 surround-sound, Stidworthy 2006-8). In this sense the prints are themselves a two-dimensional graphic translation of the surround-sound audio work. They are intended to be shown somewhere in the exhibition space of the audio work. • The examples include the voices of ‘locals’, recent immigrants and actresses, training to produce an authentic Scouse accent. Phonetic transcription, the topographies of waterfall plots and linguistic descriptions and comments describe sonic, temporal and bodily aspects of the production of the accent and hint at some of the culturally rooted ideas and stereotypes it provokes.
Imogen Stidworthy is a multi media artist who investigates the physical and social impact of the spoken word. She works with speech as a sculptural material that opens out the dimensions of space, body, sound, architecture, thought and language of the voice. Her focus is on how we communicate – the role of speech, in its presence or absence, and of language in performing and defining it. She is also a tutor at the Piet Zwart Academy and an advising researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academy

Conversation Exchange, video by Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry
• A proposition was posted in the cafe at the ICA, London, that people may 'have a conversation with the artist'. Four people took up the proposition over an afternoon, each of who sat down at a table in a one-to-one conversation, which was recorded on audio for two-minutes. After each session the conversation was quickly scripted, and the two speakers swapped seats so that they could re-enact the conversation, only that they should speak each other's words. • The conversations comprise mostly of explaining the purpose of the present encounter (which in the video is explained to the artist rather than by the artist), and various attempts to 'be interesting' on the realization that the conversation should be re-enacted on video. • This work was made during an event curated by I.D.E.A London
Karin Kihlberg (Sweden) & Reuben Henry (England) have been collaborating since 2004. Recent solo exhibitions include Citric Gallery in Brescia, Italy, Verkligheten in Umeå, Sweden, Les Mois de la Photo at SKOL in Montréal, Canada, and Castlefield Gallery in Manchester, GB. Recent group exhibitions include Strategic Questions, Bookworks in London, curated by Gavin Wade, Art Futures at Bloomberg Space, 100 Ideas Festival at Hayward Gallery and Art Summer University at Tate Modern, London, and took part in the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne. They have worked on residencies at Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, Futura in Prague and at The New Art Gallery Walsall, UK.

Parole #1: The body of the voice / Stimmkörper, catalogue presentation by Annette Stahmer
• Parole #1: The Body of the Voice / Stimmkörper is the first in a series of publications dealing with the materiality of language and highlighting the theme from various perspectives. This first issue is devoted to the voice and its “corporeality”. This involves both the relationship of the voice to the body that forms it and which it leaves in the process of speaking, and the question of the extent to which the voice forms a body for itself or slips into a new body. This publication is a collection of texts and works by international artists and scientists dealing with the “fleeting stuff” of language in an attempt to grasp it, make it visible and endow it with a body. • In addition to Parole #1: The Body of the Voice / Stimmkörper, Annette Stahmer will present the videos: Phonetic Skin (2009), A ist blau (2009), My dear (2007) and J'aime ma camera (2006).
Annette Stahmer is a designer and interdisciplinary researcher in the fields of language and communication, working with the relation between speaking and writing and the materiality of language. She is co-founder of the design office "fliegende Teilchen" in Berlin and editor of a series of publications revolving around the body and the skin of language, which are based on her research at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. The first issue "The Body of the Voice / Stimmkörper" was published 2009 by Salon Verlag, Cologne. Among her recent projects are "Memory Map" in Mexico City 2008, "Wir verheimlichen nichts" at the MuseumsQuartier Vienna 2008 and "O Corpo da Voz" in Rio de Janeiro 2009.

Imaginary Property INTERVENTION #3, Re-installation by Annett Busch and Florian Schneider
• Intervention #3 was centered around some aspects of the theories of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. The "imaginary property" research group invited to a small symposium on May 16th featuring three guests and a screening: Translated by Arianna Bove, Maurizio Lazzarato and Angela Melitopoulos gave presentations that were linked up with Bakhtins theories of utterance, polyphony and dialogic imagination.
Imaginary Property, a research project of the Jan van Eyck Design department, initiated by Florian Schneider, aspires to explore new potentials for visual art and design practices across various registers. The project is set up as a realm of experimentation at the intersections of design-theory and image-production. It is a laboratory where emerging concepts and terminologies are set to a series of tests. What challenges emerge from the paradoxes that research into ‘imaginary property’ has given rise to? How could these potentially generate new rules of production, bearing in mind that property relations are constantly exchanging meanings?

Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate, performance and artist talk by Michael Schmid
• The sonata consists of a written organization of phonetics, with notations in German. No notes, tempi, or formal dynamics are given, allowing the performer a bit of freedom. • Schwitters’ own comments: "The Sonata consists of four movements, of an overture and a finale, and seventhly, of a cadenza in the fourth movement. The first movement is a rondo with four main themes, designated as such in the text of the Sonata. You yourself will certainly feel the rhythm, slack or strong, high or low, taut or loose. To explain in detail the variations and compositions of the themes would be tiresome in the end and detrimental to the pleasure of reading and listening, and after all I'm not a professor." (quote from ubuweb)
Michael Schmid is a musician, specialized in contemporary music. He is flautist, member of the Belgian Ictus ensemble and is regularly performing with other prominent music ensembles. For the last ten years he has been toying with the Ursonate, until he finally “fümmsed” it out in the summer of 2006.

1st addendum to the Catalogue, concert by Tape That (Christophe Meierhans & Koen Nutters)
• Catalogue is a systematic collection of Tape That's own musical compositions. Entries to the catalogue (120 up to this day) function as acoustical swatches for possible, often invented sounding situations. For this addendum, the titles of the new pieces have been devised in beforehand, in regards to the particular program and situation that are expected to be found at the JVE academy on the occasion of the Voice Day. As the event unfolds, Tape That will be collecting the sounding material for their new pieces, recording samples from the different lectures and performances. At the end of the day, the première concert of 1st addendum to the Catalogue will be given, throwing a retrospective look at the Voice Day before it even has ended, through recollections taken out of Tape That's archivist frenzy.
Tape That are Koen Nutters and Christophe Meierhans. Their work is based on sound in a broad sense, not devoted to one specific format but rather developing different ones. They constantly retrieve the line between sound and non-sound as they combine and shift between installations, concerts, CD production, interventions, etc. A selection of Catalogue has been released under the name "right out of the catalogue", on Gaffer Records, Lyon.