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Let's amplify unspeakable things

Amplification of female voices

(workshops)

This is a documentation of a series of meetings/workshops I am organising together with Christina Karagianni. Our intentions come from personal experiences and we seek to explore the silencing of excluded voices, and go beyond their barriers. We combine our practices -her practice lies on choreography and dance and mine on social interaction, voice and sound- in moments of Leeszaal, an open local library, a public space of diversity. How can we engage politically with the exclusion of specific voices from the public sphere? We are borrowing methods from feminist groups and protest movements and vocal warming up exercises by Pauline Oliveros. For example, protesters would amplify the speaker's voice by repeating collectively their speech to make their presence visible. Feminists would create safe spaces where women could speak about domestic violence and make a dialogue based on listening.
We invite
during the workshops we've realised that we should reconsider the terms female/male and how to refer to those voices when inviting people
people from Leeszaal and our environment, who find themselves related and interested to this topic. The produced material is being included in an audio archive,
player.
this is how female/high-pitched voices have been described since acient times as Anne Carson observes

"Blocking our Voices"

(podcast)

The podcast "Blocking our Voices" includes a series of episodes about the ways we learn to self-control and sensor our speech. All the podcasts are made from parts of the "player", an online archive, with my voice as a narrator. The voices and sounds, you will listen to, come from workshops I have co-organised, soundwalks and media sources from a body of research.

"Voice's Transition"

(podcast)

The podcast "Voice's Transition" includes a series of episodes about the electronical transformation of one's voice into another voice in terms of gender. All the podcasts are made from parts of the "player", an online archive, with my voice as a narrator. The voices and sounds, you will listen to, come from workshops I have co-organised, soundwalks and media sources from a body of research.

"Mediating Speech"

(podcast)

The podcast "Mediating Speech" includes a series of episodes about the amplification of one's speech through the voice of others. All the podcasts are made from parts of the "player", an online archive, with my voice as a narrator. The voices and sounds, you will listen to, come from workshops I have co-organised, soundwalks and media sources from a body of research.

Player

(audio archive)

The player is an audio archive of voices and sounds from workshops I have co-organised, soundwalks and media sources from a body of research. It is a digital utterance that intends to be a reminder to the first forms of excluded female vocal expressions. I am using this material in my podcasts by mixing and overlayering them and creating a form of narrative with my own voice.

Colophon

  • This work has been produced in the context of the graduation research of Angeliki Diakrousi from the Experimental Publishing (
    XPUB
    XPUB is a two year Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design that focuses on the intents, means and consequences of making things public and creating publics in the age of post-digital networks
    ) Master course at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.
  • https://xpub.nl
  • Special thanks to Christina Karagianni for organising together these inspiring workshops, Angelique, Fatima, Lidia, Dionne and other women from
    Wereldvrouwen
    Wereldvrouwen Rotterdam Foundation does various social, educational and recreational activities for and by women from various cultures, many of them with a low income and low education level. One of their meeting points is at Leeszaal
    for participating in the workshops, and all the other participants who came in the beginning, but also the online participants who generously contributed with their voices to the website. More thanks to my tutors, XPUB comrades and all my friends with whom I had interesting discussions and tryouts that pushed my research further.
  • The last 6 workshops are part of
    Women@Art
    (free translation) Wereldvrouwen Rotterdam Foundation does various social, educational and recreational activities for and by women from various cultures, many of them with a low income and low education level. Most women hardly ever come into contact with the world of Art & Culture. Participants are encouraged to develop with inspiring examples from the art world by visiting exhibitions / studios in the city. A number of female (amateur) artists give workshops on their own work. The aim is to make the world of art more accessible, to help women to develop their own creativity and to transform it into strength
    and funded by the
    Municipality of Rotterdam
    The municipality granted to us a structural subsidy called Pitcher Perfect 010
  • The studies of Angeliki Diakrousi were funded through a scholarship by the Onassis Foundation
  • This work is licensed under the
    Free Art Licence
    [Angeliki Diakrousi, Let's Amplify Unspeakable Things, 2019. Rotterdam].
    Copyleft: This is a free work, you can copy, distribute, and modify it under the terms of the Free Art License http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/
    .
  • Source code of the website

    • About

    'Let's Amplify Unspeakable Things' is an online platform of exploration and research, regarding
    female voices
    The term 'female voices' refers as well not only to the feminine, queer, non-binary voices but also to the primitive and non-rational ways of expression, that the contemporary democracy tends to exclude
    in public and their amplification, developed by Angeliki Diakrousi. It creates a space for excluded voices to be explored (online and physical spaces), that questions the establishment of authoritative voices — which construct exclusive speech platforms and binaries, along the assumption that voices have to be rational in public dialogues. It includes a set of
    podcasts
    Different frictions emerged, between the technical and non technical
    that revisit and overlay an archive of audio recordings, produced in situated
    workshops
    and soundwalks, and media sources from a body of research. 'Let's Amplify Unspeakable Things' is based on the concept that amplification can provide presence through repetition and multiplication, as the structure of the workshops and the website reveals. The project itself is a process of feedback and iteration of actions, throughout a period of four months, situated around the space of Leeszaal and hub.xpub.nl. It exists in between the friction of institutions (a public library and an academy) and different public spheres (wereldvrouwen, academic), and it aims to go beyond their binaries.

    Diary of West Rotterdam

    (first experiments)

    This is a diary from my first experiments. It includes mostly material from my walks. I recorded sounds from the West Rotterdam,
    while walking around the neighborhood of


    Leeszaal for several days. This action was part of my first experiments when I was in attempt to understand how gender binaries regarding voice are reflected in space, especially public space.