Evening of the Voice (The Voice is False, Skin Voice & Idioter)

Evening of the Voice offers a programme of performances and artworks in which the human voice is the starting point. The voice is unique on the one hand, and as such it defines a person’s identity, but on the other hand the voice can also create a lot of disturbance whereby you’re unable to understand it anymore, e.g. when multiple voices speak at once. In the frame of You Must Change Your Life it’s the voice that incites change. Those who don’t cry out won’t be heard. The voice can compel us to follow but also establish distance. 

The Voice is False

Siri Landgren (SE)

The Voice is False is a lecture performance about the use of the voice in pop culture. With the aid of a digital vocoder, a commonly used instrument in the pop music scene that analyses and synthesises the voice, the artist points to the falsification of the voice as a style of music. The performance is set up as a lecture, yet it remains unclear to the audience whether a performance or a lecture is being staged.

Siri Landgren works with sound, music and text. In her work she transforms theory into practice, content into form, and that which is concrete embraces the abstract. The basis of Landgren’s practice is found in poststructuralist philosophy, queer theory and intersectional studies. Fascinated by the way we create meaning through sound, Landgren is absorbed by the expressive power of the voice: its immediate capacity to create a sense of cultural and bodily identity. Landgren studied philosophy at the University of Uppsala, followed by composition at the Valand School of Art in Goteborg.

Skin Voice

Anna Raimondo (IT)

The participatory performance Skin Voice starts from this assumption: how much and what kind of information can a voice convey? The work is thus based on a single instruction: listeners are invited to take part in the performance, imagining the invisible person behind the voice speaking to them, live. How does the audience imagine her/his nose? Her/his eyes? How do listeners’ voices build her/his body and personality?

Anna Raimondo is an Italian artist based in Brussels. Her research explores listening as both a political and aesthetic experience, using sound as a device to build relational environments. She has participated in several international exhibitions, residencies and festivals including the solo show Beyond voice. Me, you and everyone who is listening at Arte Contemporanea Bruxelles (BE); the 5th Marrakech Biennale (MA); Espace (Im)Media in Sporobole Art Center (Sherbrooke, CA); etc. Her radiophonic works have been broadcast internationally (Kunst Radio (AT); Deutschlandradio Kultur (DE); Resonance fm (UK); Arte Radio (FR) etc.)

Idioter

Alma Söderberg (SE) & Hendrik Willekens (BE)

Idioter is a collaboration between the artists Alma Söderberg and Hendrik Willekens. Together they create a concert performance in which Willekens’ music supports Söderberg’s bodily movements and voice. She plays with syllables, intonation, cadence, gestures and dream language - creating a play between intensity and rhythm. The focus is on the flow. In addition the work includes drawings by Willekens: geometric landscapes that disappear into a single vanishing point. He makes these drawings over and over again whereby the expansion of the landscape becomes a theme in the work; each time the viewer is drawn towards the same ‘nothingness’.

Alma Söderberg works as a choreographer, performer and performing musician, having studied flamenco, contemporary dance and choreography. Söderberg makes performances in which sound, movement and speech (singing, dancing and talking) are of equal importance. She has produced three solo performances: Entertainment, Cosas and Travial, has a continuing collaboration with Jolika Sudermann with whom she made the performance A Talk, and is also a musician in the performance band John The Houseband. She graduated in 2010 from the SNDO choreography department of the Amsterdam Art Academy.

Hendrik Willekens was born in Belgium where he still lives and works. He studied theatre and mime. As a performer he has collaborated and worked with a.o. and Roy Peters, John The Houseband and Nicole Beutler.