Leaning into the audible to hear the inaudible call its own name

Abstract from Salomé Voegelin

‘What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?’ (Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You, 2017, p3)
This presentation is a curatorial performance, a talk that performs what it means to say. And so it agitates words through sound, movements and pauses to reflect on the politics of silence as the place of the not yet heard and the not yet said. To sound at once the promise of an unheard articulation and its emancipatory force, to hear the deliberate and violent suppression that determines what should not and cannot be heard, and to illuminate also the tyrannies of what is not able to or does not dare to sound. This silence is not the absence of sound. Instead it is the context of its production and reception that determines its audibility and the potency of its reach. It is the critical edge of music and sound art and is governed by what can be seen, heard and understood: what has a name and what can make itself count, and it is where the inaudible expands the invisible and questions its boundaries. This performance tries to make these silences meet to hear their overlaps, investments and possibilities, and hear another voice.