by Felicia Konrad and Julieanna Preston
A chorus of geo-haptic tones: It is common knowledge that sound waves travel through the environment and atmosphere as energy that vibrates the molecules of solid, liquid, or gaseous material. Their acoustic behaviour is a reflective, absorptive, or transmissive response to any surface with which they come in contact. Temperature, wind speed, humidity, topography, season, currents, tides, and solar and lunar cycles propagate sound waves in global and local landscapes. A voice launched is a sound that touches the world. What happens when the world touches back? This is a vocal performance between two friends, two women, two lands, two continents on opposite sides of the earth. Two voices migrate back and forth in an improvisational, vibrating circuitry navigating through thick, loose, dense, light, smooth, turbid, calm, fierce and fickle geography, each refrain gaining and loosing bits of the landscape it has touched as it unfurls and unfolds. Adjustments and inflections retune the voice as it makes its way from here to there, now to then, her to her, again and again—a refrain of geo-haptic tones. Not as simple as calling out to send a message, it is a volley, a round, a processual chorus transformed by a process of repeated exchanges keeping voice alive, fluid and connected to the body and world. A voice projected, unleashed, and roaming wild, sheds its habit to be proper song, harmonious and melodic sound, and voice disciplined as a mouthpiece of spoken language, text, words, and chatter. Travelling through a global geography, this voice regains its suppressed rawness, its relation to the gut and bodily orifices—a process of reclaiming voice as it might have been before its castration from sensations, emotions, and subjectivities, perhaps before the voice was colonised as a cognitive word-based communication instrument.
Felicia Konrad, Independent Artist, Malmö, Sweden
Felicia Konrad is a multidisciplinary artist (voice/sound art/performance/music/text/film) living in Malmö, Sweden. Her solo works are mostly minimalistic, playful, poetic, humorous small-scale pieces; as a cultural project leader artivist/climate activist, she is involved with collaborative, interactive, collectives. Recent works include an intuitive art project I Still Live in Water, an on-going collaborative sound piece (Konrad/Carlsson/Persson/Quartey) entitled Breathing Water, and an upcoming 2022 voice/sound/performance work called The Oracle. www.feliciakonrad.se/ www.istillliveinwater.com/ www.breathingwater.se
Dr Julieanna Preston, Professor of Spatial Practice, Massey University, New Zealand
Julieanna Preston is an artist and spatial designer whose creative practice has found a home in durational, site situated, sonic art, vocalisation and body movement works. Her performances, videos, installations, and scholarship extend attributes, qualities, and agency to worldly materials, places, pages and written and spoken words in search of a spectrum of intimate and animate modalities. Julieanna is a postgraduate supervisor for creative practice research projects at Massey University.
