Summer Course: Other Voices
As part of the 'Neuhaus' curriculum and its quest for 'other knowledge', we are organizing the workshop 'Other Voices', in which we will study, listen to, memorize, speak, utter, exchange, move, create, present and learn from 'other voices.' The workshop is open to participants from cross-disciplinary fields of art, theory and social action. Participants come together for four consecutive days to engage in seminars, lectures, performative exercises and a concluding day of public presentations.
27 August 2019 11:00 - 30 August 2019 17:00
Other Voices focuses on ways of living that present a challenge to not only the human world order, but also to the 'knowable'. The workshop will explore how we can envision ways of living according to a more-than-human logic. Unlike the bodies embodying them, voices are errant. In this workshop we engage with the voices of cultures - both in a secular and religious context - that speak from the present, from the past, and even from the dead. The participants will explore the voice through real, virtual, digital, juridical and fictitious bodies. They will reconsider the voice of the artist in the frame of 'post-human' as well as rethink the voice as a human agency when the concept of 'human' is so-called in crisis.
Other Voices is part of a new research project continuing from the MA Master of Voice (Sandberg Institute Amsterdam, 2016-2018), combining art, education, philosophy and activism to look at the (human) voice as it is uninterruptedly connected to the corporeal and the social, that is, the bodies through which we speak. By exploring archives, traditions, texts, cases, stories, and non-confirmative ways of living, this research is aimed at bringing forward 'voices' as inspiration, and as material for exploring the artistic condition, understood as a position of radicality of one-self with the world.
Programme
Workshops, readings and presentations by: Rana Hamadeh, Nissa Nishikawa, Jamila Johnson-Small/ /Last Yearz Interesting Negro, Karima Boudou, Tarek Lakhrissi
Course leader: Lisette Smits (Master of Voice)
Day 1, 27 August 2019
Outside the law: The Saint
We engage with forms of withdrawal; (wilful) silences; "the right to opacity" (Glissant); as well as language and living according to 'extra-human' logic-- from Jeanne d'Arc to Chelsea Manning.
Day 2, 28 August 2019
Outlaw: The Witch
"Why do some voices matter more than others?" We study the systemic exclusion of non-confirmative bodies and identities--drawing from feminist theory, critical race theory, and gender positioning.
Day 3, 29 August 2019
Fuck the Law: The Accomplice
On the third day, we ask: "How to undermine the system that we are bound and tied to, and that subordinates us?" We read the political theory of prison abolitionists, transgressive fiction, and other "conspiracies-without-plot" thinking.
Day 4, 30 August 2019
Public programme and presentations by participants
Lisette Smits
Lisette Smits is trained as an artist and works as a curator and educator. Since 2015 she has been researching the use of the human voice as a means and / or medium of an artistic practice. As a first result, this research resulted in the temporary MA of the Master of Voice (2016-2018). This programme focuses on the human voice, and all its social, cultural and technological forms, and questions the prominent role of the voice in our post-industrial society.