30 Apr 2014

Solo show by Anna Raimondo with a critical response by Lucia Farinati, Arte Contemporanea, Brussels

Beyond Voice.
Me, you and everyone who is listening

Beyond Voice explores the relational horizon of voice and its linguistic and political implications. Me, you and everyone who is listening are the implicated subjects of a journey that starts whenever we hear the call. But who is calling?

It has often been said that the voice stands at the intersection of body and language, but this intersection, as Mladen Dolar has remarked, belongs to neither. Although voice can be described in terms of pure sound phenomena (the sound emitted through the cavities of the body)its common (or essential) destination is speech: phonemes, words, sentences, in short, language. Voice can also be understood, in a metaphorical sense, as the process of giving an account of yourself, a gesture, if not a desire, to tell who you are, before telling what you are. Voice is, in this sense, the embodied expression of uniqueness. Beyond linguistic structure and articulation it is always the manifestation of human singularity.

Anna Raimondo has traversed the urban space in order to enter or intrude into others' acoustic territories. She has declaimed her personal statements in the street and collected written encouragements from women that have been inspired by other women. She has created a playlist for a 'Gender Karaoke' and also arranged a special mix of arousing sounds that everyone can play and activate through their own portable device. Who is calling here, is the performative voice of the artist, a voice that invokes, interrogates and provokes the other through body gestures, recorded utterances, sonic interventions and linguistic détournements. As the artist states: 'I am not interested in the pure sonic dimension of voice, but above all in the implications of voice'.

By embracing the very idea of listening as the moment of sharing and inter-subjectivity, this exhibition brings together a new body of video and audio works in which the boundaries of public and private experience are investigated and overturned. Departing from radio and immerging herself in the flow of everyday life, Beyond Voice is not a metaphysical journey, the mere solipsistic act of hearing oneself speaking, but an invitation to take part in the complex and contagious process that listening to voice(s) implies. A gesture launched into the air which implicates the listener with his/her own answers and response(abilities).

Anna Raimondo is an Italian artist based in Brussels. In 2012, she completed a MA in Sound Arts at the London College of Communication (University of the Arts). Since then, she has been invited to several exhibitions and festivals including the 5th Marrakech Biennale (Ma);Espace (IM) Media in Sporobole Art Center (Sherbrooke,Ca); international Dirty Ear at Errant Bodies (Berlin, De); the public art festival Paraphrasing Babel (Maastricht, Nl); Ruído Branco at the Jaqueline Martins Gallery (São Paulo, Br); the Nouzah Fenia – Festival de Casablanca (Ma). Her radiophonic works have been broadcast in different countries and languages: Kunst Radio (At);Deutschlandradio Kultur (De); ArteRadio (Fr); Rai (It) ; RTBF (Be). Her curatorial projects mainly focus on sound and radio art and have been presented in such venues as the V&A Museum (London, Uk) and Le Cube-Independent Art Room (Rabat, Ma). With Younes Baba-Ali, she co-curates Saout Radio,a platform for sound and radio art based in Morocco. With Amélie Agut,she initiated the itinerant radio project on sonic memories, Echoes. Raimondo's research explores listening as both a political and aesthetic experience, using sound as a tool to create relational spaces. By voice, language and sonic ambulation, in-between performance and interventions in public space, her work proposes a negotiation between verbal and non-verbal communication, while inviting the audience's active involvement.

Lucia Farinati (It/Uk) is an independent curator based in London and the Director of Sound Threshold, an interdisciplinary curatorial project that explores the relationships between site, sound and text. She studied on the Curatorial Programme at Goldsmiths College, (London, Uk), Public Art and European Cultural Planning at De Montfort University,(Leicester, Uk) and History of Art and Aesthetics at the Faculty of Humanities,University of Trento (It). She has collaborated with many sonic art projects and radio initiatives including Dirty Ear Forum, bip bop, Sound Proof 5, Errant Bodies, Audio Arts, e-Xplo, Resonance 104.4 FM, Institution of Rot, Radio Papesse and Radio Arte Mobile. She co-edited Transmission, a book commissioned by Sound and Music for the 8th edition of the Cut & Splice Festival, (London, Uk) 2010 and is currently researching and writing The Force of Listening, a book on the role of listening in contemporary conjunctions between art and activism

Special Thanks
Graphic project: Younes Baba-Ali.
Exhibition assistance: Léa Belooussovitch, Paul Boudeau, João Freitas.
Video and sound operators: Chiara Caterina, Corinne Dubien, Caroline Houben.
Translations and translations reviews: Philippe Hunt, Monique Moncorger, Adriano Pappalardo.