Arresting the Echo: Using the Tenets of Printmedia to Work with the Voice and Perform Mourning

Abstract

In this reflection on my last year of practice, I will describe how print media’s contextual framework directly informed my strategies and ultimately characterised my approach to working with the voice, allowing me to take on the work of embodying loss. To do this, I extended print media's theories on the relationships between original and reproduction, and matrix and impression, to apply to any recording device. Namely, I considered the print/recorded voice as an echo of the previous body, the press/recorder as an apparatus with the ability to broadcast and create empathy, and the shared practice of breaking down and building into layers as a working metaphor for individual and community agency.  

I was motivated to research this topic after observing the ways many people have become isolated from the rituals that help them navigate their lives. Restrictions on coming together have meant that communities, families, and individuals are not able to perform and acknowledge change effectively. To me, this large-scale stagnation represents a general disassociation from our bodies and disregard for the role our bodies play in exercising empathy and care in troubling times. My antidote to this disembodiment has been to consider the voice as a material that both broadcasts the individual body and can overcome spatial restrictions by being amplified and recorded. In the resulting work, Arresting the Echo, I translated this framework to three performance works that use my voice to create space to perform mourning and empowerment together. By applying this framework, I found that the dogma of contemporary print practice prepared me to ask myself and my audience to work with echoes and stay with loss.