Katherine MacBride

Following Katherine MacBride's project Polyvocal Subjects that took place at Transmisison in 2014, Katherine presents:

 undoing listening

two days of workshops, food and performances/

a publication as doing things together in public/

a collaboration between Alison Smith, Anna Frei, Anna Mclauchlan, Anneke Kampman, emilia beatriz, Fred Hystère, Kari Robertson, Katherine MacBride, Kym Ward, Romy Rüegger, Sandra Alland and Transmission 

facilitated by Katherine MacBride and Transmission

28th July, 11.00-17.00, Transmission Gallery

A day long workshop considering listening and the conditions in which we listen, through different modes of shared experience — breathing, moving, music, audiovisual presentations, talking, laughing — with Alison Smith, Anna McLauchlan, Anneke Kampman, Kari Robertson, Katherine MacBride, and Kym Ward.

Each contributor will bring a range of materials/exercises/processes for us to consider and explore together as a group. Please also feel welcome (but no pressure) to bring anything you’d like the group to consider and we will make space in the day for it. The format and pacing of the day will be responsive to the needs/desires/attentions/capacities/experiences/knowledges of everyone present. Particular attention will be given throughout to collective-care and self-care. 

The workshops will not be recorded in any way as this can be inhibitive of open processes of exploring complex and sometimes difficult questions together. There is no pre-intended outcome other than a desire to have some shared experiences and conversations that can nurture our present and future thinkings and doings. There will be a pdf produced afterwards and circulated on the Transmission website which all workshop participants are welcome to contribute to.

Free with booking required. Please mail info@transmissiongallery.org to reserve a place or ask for more information, and to discuss any access needs we can accommodate. Vegan lunch will be provided.

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28th July, 18.00-21.00, Transmission Gallery

speechless cooking session, shared vegan meal, listening session

Free, no booking required, just turn up with an ingredient and/or a sound file to bring into the mix.

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29th July, 19.00-23.00, Transmission Gallery

an evening of performances, films and poetry by Alison Smith, Anna Frei, Anneke Kampman, Romy Rüegger, Sandra Alland, and a dj set from Fred Hystère

Free, no booking required. BSL interpretation will be provided.

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Transmission Gallery has street parking and an accessible toilet. All events will take place on the level with the on street entrance at 28 King Street. All films will be shown with subtitles. Audio description is available. Please mail info@transmissiongallery.org to to discuss any access needs we can accommodate.

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Workshop descriptions

Alison Smith

Thinking together about visual noise and silence, sounds, and relationships within space, Alison is developing some experiential exercises based on reading situations and people without sound. She will also show one of her films as part of the discussion.

Anna McLauchlan 

Breath and breathing, for many people, is largely unconscious. However, the practice of breathing conditions the quality and strength of sound we produce. Alongside this, tuning into your own breath can be meditative and thus can precede intimate awareness of both proximate and distant situations and events. This workshops links the breath and breathing to broader somatic experience; practically exploring how breath connects people, can shape and communicate affect, and can assist in awareness (and perhaps dissolution) of broader social conditioning.

Anneke Kampman

The Song Stays On The Air For A Few Weeks Affecting Almost Everyone 

A talk and guided listening session focusing on how the recorded voice in popular song acts as a method through which affects and intensities both human and non-human are distributed. How does the inscription of a 'digital rhythm into the social body' manifest itself through the patterns and cadence of the recorded voice? We will listen to a series of vocal recordings complied for their sonority and through our close listening attempt to activate hidden qualities. 

Kari Robertson 

Kari Robertson will present a play on 'minor gesture' in the loose form of an audio-visual collage. The presentation draws from a number of textual and time-based sources exploring gesture in relation to gender, sexuality and social class, neuro-queer anti-ableism and anti-psychiatry. Cast includes: Simone Weil, Giorgio Agamben, Samuel Beckett, Jane Arden, Sara Ahmed, Erin Manning, Julia Bascom, Stefano Harney & Fred Moten and Josephine the Songstress. 

Kym Ward (devised with Fiona James)

Listening to the vibrations of swells & shudders that rush through our bodies in laughter, this workshop will act on the networked release of the guffaw, the laugh as a neurological process and peaks and pitches of the body collapsing in and out of trust. 

Performance descriptions

Alison Smith will perform BSL performance poetry with live voice over. 

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Anna Frei is thinking about preparing a collaborative performative listening-/reading-/conversation setting. With punch card string figure loops, tender drones, fruit punch and the present relational knowledges.

…a sound in the present that will come back in the future. when it comes back it is a part of the past. thus time is expanded to past, present, and future as performance continuum. Pauline Oliveros about using delay in Opening the Sound Field: Pauline Oliveros’ Improvisations with Magnetic Tape by David W. Bernstein

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Anneke Kampman, Figures. Figure. Stuck. Solo vocal performance. This work puts a range of experiments in voice and movement to use, asking: how are commercial processes enacted within the fabric of our thinking and through the texture (language, tone and prosody) of our speech? Can we ever escape the feeling that we are “stuck” reproducing the will of a political system driven by competition, de-regulation and control? How does the singing voice act as a vehicle for these motivations? By choosing to perform the ‘production’ of my own voice live - from my ‘internal’ intentions to their ‘external’ manifestation as song - I make an attempt to disentangle it from these kinds of relations. 

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Romy Rüegger is making a performance connected to questions of unlearning, associations and waves.

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Examining language, gender, artificial intelligence and disability, Sandra Alland will present a selection of short films and poems from their various books including Naturally Speaking and Blissful Times - plus work from the new anthology, Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back.

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Fred Hystère will prepare a deep listening dj-set meandering through transformative synth waves, polyrhythmic landscapes, emancipatory voices, softcore hystèria & opaque polytonalities.

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Contributors

Alison Smith is a Deaf, queer, BSL performance poet from the Scottish Showpeople community. Her writing and performance draws on personal experiences and life observations. Since 2009 she has been using film as a medium, writing and performing in Fingers and Kettle's Boiling (in collaboration with Sandra Alland). Her performances juxtapose BSL poetry with live narrative voice over from another artist. Her work has featured in festivals and exhibitions, including (b)other (GOMA, 2009), Entzaubert (Berlin), LGBT History Month Scotland, BFI Love Season Tour (2015) and Disability Arts Online’s Viewfinder.

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Anna Frei/Fred Hystère is a collaboratrice, sonic researcher, graphic designer, editor, DJ and record store co-operator who lives and works in Zürich, Switzerland. She*s deeply interested in the transformative possibilities of the sonic, feminist modes of organising and listening, careful collaborations, complicated rhythms and practices of radical generosity and sharing. She* organises audio-related gatherings and concerts and works in mostly collaborative performance and sound projects. As a freelance graphic designer/conceptrice she* likes to think forms for publications or editions and loves to cook for many people. Since 2014, she* co-operates and co-curates OOR Records/OOR Saloon.

As DJ Fred Hystère she*s searching for multi-layered, emancipatory narratives within experimental DJ mixes, collaborates on performances and research-based audio-pieces (with knowbotiqs, Romy Rüegger, Oliw Michel, Franziska Koch, Sally Schonfeldt, amongst many others) and likes to mix vinyl with lots of delay without the pressure of normative dancefloors.

OOR Records/OOR Saloon (One’s Own Room) is a collective-run record-/art book store, soundspace and sound related production context in Zürich. The OOR Saloon wishes to create collaborative spaces for negotiations of emancipatory artistic practices related to sound. 

www.oor-rec.ch

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Anna Mclauchlan was trained as an artist, disciplined in environmental studies and hatha yoga, and has delighted in geography. She is a learner, teacher, researcher and writer who currently lectures in critical human geography at the University of Leeds. Anna’s research draws from her awareness of environmental policy and politics, contemporary art and somatic practices, investigating the outcomes of the choice of method used to produce geographical knowledge. She seeks to explore underlying organisational approaches and bring seemingly contrasting topics into productive relation.

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Anneke Kampman is a Scottish artist currently based in London where she recently completed a programme of study at Open School East. Her projects have taken the form of performances, audiovisual installations, vinyl records, films, essays, and lectures. 

Her practice concerns the politics and poetics of sound, examining the affects, languages and intensities (both human and non-human) that stick to the singing voice. Her works show how these qualities of enunciation are regulated and distributed; highlighting the ways in which the voice can become a seductive agent for capital. These works take the performative acts generated through writing, speaking, singing and listening as a starting point, focusing on the role of sound in social communication. 

Recent performances and exhibitions include: Songs For Another Voice LP (2017) exhibition, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Where Blips of Light Called Players Disintegrate (2016) performance, Jerwood Visual Arts, London and Labyrinthine (2017) a collaborative Opera performed at The Self The Other Festival in Brussels (Commissioned by La Monnaie De Munt/QO2) and the BBC Glasgow Tectonics Festival. 

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emilia beatriz is an artist and organiser from the diaspora of puerto rico who lives and works in spaces in-between. 

presently emilia is re-learning how to attend to the needs of their body in fluxuating states of sickness and so-called mental illness; producing multilingual science fiction and accidental poetry in collaboration with their iphone; existing in waves of mutual care and complicated affection with their 97-year-old abuela;  recording feminist oral histories on themes of land struggle, plants, and health in puerto rico and vieques; and being attentive to their relationship with water. 

emilia collaborates in formations including Letitia Beatriz aka care and rage (a practice of friendship/movement; queer/feminist zine library; and transtemporal embodied performance) and Collective Text (precarious freelancers who transcribe and create closed captioning for arts-specific contexts). 

Katherine adds: emilia is contributing to these events from afar in ways that will become clear as they unfold. 

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Kari Robertson is an artist living and working between Rotterdam and Scotland. She works primarily with moving image, sound and text and frequently collaborates. Her works are preoccupied with understanding how contemporary subjectivities are formed, distributed and (un)sanctioned in their articulation.

Kari is one third of GHOST, a facilitative platform for visual art, writing and music based in Rotterdam.

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Katherine MacBride researches processes, materials and textures of relations. Aspects of her interest in this include: the mediation of intimacies through technologies; embodied close listening practices; non-linguistic forms of knowledge, expression and relation such as affect and touch; and the consideration of art beyond representation as a means of encountering other bodies. She uses a range of collaborative and individual artistic methods which encompass critical, affirmative and speculative-propositional modes. 

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Kym Ward moves between more solitary performance research practice and organising and enabling alternative or non-hierarchical educations. Her interests lie in productive critique: of softwares’ production of social relation, of technologies of organisation and, when possible, the cheeky reappropriation of institutional structures. Most recently working with École de Recherche Graphique (ERG) in Brussels, she co-ran workshops as part of Teaching To Transgress (http://www.erg.be/erg/spip.php?breve925&lang=fr).

She works with an intersectional feminist reading group – Knowledge is a Does (KIAD) who formed around questions of queer exhaustion, reproductive labour and embodied knowledges.  KIAD’s reparative practices developed through reading Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; the latest manifestation was Haptic Reading, Listen with Skin, a text/deep listening interaction commissioned by Metropolis M (March 2017). She makes video essays (Weaving & The Algorithm, 2016), spells for adults (Air/Fire, 2017) and shorts for kids (Swellshark, 2017). She has co-organised alternative edu- moments such as RELEARN, summer school in Brussels and Barcelona, and video production with We Are Here, refugee support network, Amsterdam.

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Romy Rüegger is an artist and writer. She lives and works in Zurich and is interested in feminist politics of the spoken and the written as interventions into power relations and a survivor's history. She works with documents, the ephemeral and the real, and is developing shared practices of listening and unlearning by voicing and spacing. She shows and publishes her performances, texts and audio works with and by recorded voices as site specific writings and artistic resumptions.

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Sandra Alland is a writer, filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist. Recent joys include co-editing Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press, 2017), contributing short stories to Comma Press' Thought X and Protest! (2017), performing one of those stories as an integrated-access multimedia show at Transpose Barbican, and co-creating new documentaries for Disability Arts Online's Viewfinder. Sandra has published three books of poetry, including Naturally Speaking, a collaboration with dictation software exploring disability, gender, capitalism and more. www.blissfultimes.ca