SOUND POLITICS VOICE

To apply for a place and a travel bursary send a pdf titled “SOUND POLITICS VOICE seminar statement” with your name, where you are based and 100 words outlining why you would like to participate to [email protected].

Deadline for applications is Monday 9 September 2024 at 17:00 BST.

SOUND POLITICS VOICE is a free seminar that will investigate how sonic encounters within the artistic realm can discuss and embody socio-political material as both subject and as form. It will consider how sonic documents can reveal and/or obscure histories, both personal and public, and how artists can use and re-use archives of sound to examine these complexities. The event will further engage with how the acoustic environment of such sound works (sonic here understood in an expanded sense) can propose creative and critical responses to intersectional identities in situations such as post-conflict zones and migratory lived experience. The aim is to begin to establish a new, practical discourse around the political possibilities of sound. We will be listening to specific examples of works which use sound in this way.

Participation

This event is strictly capped at 10 participants to allow for free-flowing conversation. As we expect it to be a popular event, we ask you to provide a short statement (100 words) about yourself, where you are based, and why you want to participate.

Travel bursaries are available: £40 per person for participants based more than 50 miles out of Edinburgh, £20 for those based less than 50 miles out of Edinburgh and £10 for those based in Edinburgh, reimbursement will be made in cash on the day of the seminar. Light refreshments will be provided.

Seminar leads:

Maria Fusco is a working-class Belfast-born writer. She’s the author of eight books, writer/director of four largescale touring performance works and two film scripts. Often experimental in form, her work is characterised by critical attention to intersectional socio-economic circumstances, through an insistence on ethical critical deceleration, asking ‘who has the right to speak, and, in what way?’
Her most recent works are an opera-film History of the Present, co-made with artist filmmaker Margaret Salmon, with new music by Annea Lockwood and Who does not envy with us is against us; a collection of lyric essays about working-class-ness as method. She is Professor of Interdisciplinary Writing at the University of Dundee. Find out more on mariafusco.net

Johanna Linsley is an artist and writer working across performance, sound and text. Her forthcoming book, Sonic Detection: Necessary Notes for Art and Performance, co-written with Rebecca Collins, is a creative-critical exploration of aural attention as engagement with political form. Her project Listening to Scotland’s Performance Archives, funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, examines how audio documentation reveals alternative histories of radical and experimental art practices. She is a Lecturer in Creative Practice and Programme Lead for English, Creative Writing and Film at the University of Dundee.

History of the Present film still (2023). Photography by Margaret Salmon.