Abstracts
Abstracts
This research investigates voice through the lens of artistic research. Rather than approach voice as an innate, unique, or essential property of the body or self, the research understands voice as a relational phenomenon, emerging from the interaction between vocalizer and listener and shaped by sociocultural, political, geographical, and historical conditions. Departing from a performance encounter in which an audience member described “hearing ancestors speaking through” voice without sharing the language spoken, the work asks what exceeds language in acts of voice. The presentation takes the form of a lecture performance, unfolding from a central tenet of artistic research: art is first a method of inquiry and secondly a format of dissemination. As such, its structure is polyvvocal in nature, allowing for the academic, poetic, and performative to coexist and engage in questions of relationality, orality, racialized listening, and embodied knowledge. In doing so, the research argues for a voice that is a distributed, contingent, and emergent process through which meaning is conintuously negotiated and positions artistic research as a necessary practice to attune to that emergence.