Voicing: Imogen Stidworthy’s Practice of Exodus

Abstract

UNCONVENTIONAL LANGUAGE ‘The first time that I borrowed someone else’s voice I was six years old,’ writes DJ Savarese.1 From a very young age, for the public speaker, activist, and writer, communication with verbal people has involved relying on media including photos, movie clips, writing, soundbites, sign language, speech-generating computers, and augmentative and alternative communication devices. Contrary to the dominant idea of a single, unique, internal voice that defines one’s individuality, for ‘nontraditionally speaking people’, voice can be thought of as an accumulation of heterogeneous elements coming together to produce (or be reduced to) a single message, for the benefit of verbal people. The realm of nontraditional language operates outside of essences (i.e. subject and object) and in-between elements, in a moving network of relations. It is a space of potentiality.2 In order to be understood in the conventional world, where meaning relies on a stable system of unities (with a supposedly clear sequence of beginning, middle and end), those at its periphery have to find ways of containing a fluid space within one image, signification or subjectivity. In so doing, they must swap gesture, sound, rhythm, movement, vibration and texture – that is, multisensory ways of being – for a narrow idea of communication. Savarese’s article invites us to imagine what it would mean to rebuild our communication techniques and technologies from the standpoint of nontraditionally speaking people. This would involve exiting the ‘cultivated garden’ of the West and reject its logocentrism, for new ‘multimodal’ methods of expression.3