An evening of readings, videos and performances from a group of artists working through the embodiment of voice, inscription and linguistic dynamics. Exploring the haptics of auto-ethnographic writing, found text and technology-assisted transcription, the event features diverse schemas of approaching voicing, mouthing and speaking through self and others.

With contributions from Ioanna Gerakidi, Juliet Jacques, Erica Scourti, Cally Spooner, Jesper List Thomsen.

The evening is initiated by Ioanna Gerakidi and Erica Scourti, in collaboration with Hot Wheels Projects and is accompanied by a forthcoming publication of a collection of texts by the contributing artists.

Readings and Performances

Jesper List Thomsen will be reading from a work in progress (yet to be titled) The Body, The Body, The Tongue; The Neoliberal I; Blackbirds. He will also show a painting featuring a nine meter long line, the length of the average human digestive tract starting from the mouth and ending at the anus.

Lost to the Phosphorus (2017) by Erica Scourti

Moving through darkness and the application of makeshift apotropaic devices, a text exploring psychic, linguistic and somatic contamination slips between registers of intelligibility, trying to find a way to resist solid borders.

Chorus Parade* by by Ioanna Gerakidi

Chorus Parade is a composition of erotic letters and sounds written for past, current and future lovers.
Chorus Parade is a text about love, lust, desire and grief.
Chorus Parade is an invitation.

When words are arrogant, voices are wilfully loud.

*The title is borrowed by the homonymous sound piece written by Nikos Xydakis for Theater of Thessaly’s Production Electra.

Sertraline Surrealism by Juliet Jacques

Sertraline Surrealism is a fragmentary text that explores how concepts of the 'mad, neglected genius' and the 'convulsive woman' fed into the Romantic and Surrealist movements, and how they impact upon younger artists, through a reading of gender-neutral writer/artist Claude Cahun. In this performance, Jacques reads from the work to a soundtrack by Vladislav Delay, looking at how misogyny and mental health stigma continue to affect creative choices.

Cally Spooner United In Stomach Flu, London Weeps
A reading from a novel in progress on states of rehearsal, Galileo's telescope, out-of-work speech writers, sweat, shame, false tears and outsourcing.

Videos

You Will Be Free by Juliet Jacques

You Will Be Free responds to Cookie Mueller & Vittorio Scarpati's ‘Putti’s Pudding’ - a series of drawings and texts made together as the two lovers were dying from AIDS-related illnesses in 1989 - utilising a quote from Mueller’s writing as a point of departure for Jacques’ poetic reflections on the impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis, as well as notions surrounding death, the body and afterlife.

I Statements by Erica Scourti

A continuous self-centred monologue of statements generated from the artist’s diary written into a loose associative text.

OFF CAMERA DIALOGUE by Cally Spooner
Recalling a marketing practice whereby the voice and words of employees are coached, tweaked and scored to the point of musical crescendo to produce a smoother corporate image.