SELF-REVERSING
#performance #soundart
2018 on
footages Johan Planefeld
Through singing "backwards", the work is designed to recursively confront and interpret the ghosts of female hysteria and to recuperate and empower a female subject in her vocality. The performance opens with simple songs and then incrementally transforms into a radical vocal experiment. Unfolding backwards, "Self-reversing" invites the audience to re-imagine language and the flows of communication and power through the voice. It exposes the untamed richness of oppressed vocality in the female body under late capitalism and its stringent requirements for comprehensibility and emotional control in the public sphere.
The work captures, reverses, and re-plays the vocal audio signal, a technique broadly used in music and sound art. But here it is then replayed into the performer’s headphones to be utilized as a "score" for re-interpretation in real-time. This process occurs multiple times and with each new iteration is again reversed and fed back to the performer via headphones, so she can sing what she hears. In other words, this score is "looped." Naturally occurring distortions and mistakes shape the core of the new sound piece through each iteration. They emerge as the result of the recording process.
In 2023 the Italian foundation "MAXII" awarded "Self reversing" with the prize "Performative".
The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
ph: Matteo Rapella, Fondazione MAXXI © Giada Spera, Eugenia Chetvertkova
