em voz alta – an open session of live readings: of excerpts, texts and stories that you want to be heard by/for those who come to the ZDB Aquarium courtyard, on the evening of Monday, April 21. The texts needn’t and shouldn’t be written by the person reading them, but the words of others who have said them – whatever their length or style.
This time, the voices are challenged to come together in a shared reading. The plan continues to be to create a listening space where voices (re)sound and meet, with a focus on the gesture of narrating together.
Anyone can take part, either as a reader or listener. Beginning at 9:30 p.m. and running until 1:30 a.m., the readings will be interspersed with musical performances by Miguel Abras.
What can voices do? There is always something that overflows in the word that is quoted, a body that announces itself. If air is the raw material of the voice, sound is the material it generates, an event that takes place outside of itself but which drags the body with it in the space between bodies where it (res)sounds and vibrates. Like any body that moves, the voice is always more than one, shaped by the movement that drives the air from the lungs to the larynx as much as by the path between the mouth and the ear, the acoustic conditions of the room, the expectations of the listener. Negotiating its contours in the way it affects and lets itself be affected, in the volume of its amplification, from whisper to shout. Can I really say that this voice is mine? Perhaps it promises something it can’t deliver – a body trying to be someone – an impossible singularity. It’s not just because, when we speak, we never own the words we say, always subject to them being transformed into another mouth and another timbre. It’s because, in the interval between one word and another, and in everything the voice can say without them, there is already an expropriation going on, a danger of contagion. In its enigmatic and multiplying appeal, the voice shatters the mythical totality of presence when it transforms the quotable into the quoted in the unrepeatable present of its embodied enunciation and its reverberation, frustrating even the most faithful phonograph – some say that the first was writing, but is there really a place where everything begins? In the making of any origin, the narrative function of any story is less about the starting point itself than the path to which it points and materializes, and which, from mouth to mouth, all voices can transform.
– Sallim
Telling a story, by ear, by the side of a bed, in a whisper or projection, in this courtyard, let’s imagine. The impact of being able to invent and share what you’ve invented and wait for the story you’ve heard to be carefully integrated, for the essentials to be taken from it so that when it’s told again, an electric movement of revolution is generated.
Reading and witnessing, the action of telling and the electricity in receiving, are all potential formulas for activating other possible ways of enriching the senses, stimulating them, pushing the limits to new, ever-expanding designs.
Imagination, as an exercise in writing and drawing, is a revealing blanket of will, of possibilities, of different and extraordinary operations that become an essential tool for activating other lives and places of freedom.
