Photo: Anna Holveck.
Photo: Anna Holveck.
As part of the exhibition “Un·Tuning Together. Practicing listening with Pauline Oliveros” at Bétonsalon, artist Anna Holveck invites people to participate to a collective vocal experience in a workshop culminating in a public performance. Between warm-ups, sound improvisations, acoustic games, readings, discussions and projections, this workshop will give the group of around fifteen participants time to build a shared quality of listening. All these collective experiments will feed into the composition of the score and framework for the new performance.
The performance will be built around the idea of an acousmatic voice, “whose source one cannot see, a voice whose origin cannot be identified, a voice one cannot place” (Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 2006). With the group, the path of experimentation will start with a simple gesture derived from yawning, that of modestly covering the mouth with the hand. In childhood, the neurological sensitivity of the hand and mouth develop simultaneously and are associated with the discovery of the world. The mobility of the hand and the activity of the mouth temper each other.
In the workshop, the hand, which is at once a tool, a mask and an acoustic panel, will be used to conceal the source of the voice, to shape its sonorities and to blur its spatial origin.
Anna Holveck would like to take these experiments towards a collective performance that will gradually integrate the voices of members of the audience. As if after a yawn, hidden behind their hands and complicit in the unfolding of the performance, the performers will accompany the audience in a collective improvisation using the vocal framework resulting from the workshop research. In this discreet way, all the bodies present (performers and audience) will be able to vocalize or listen to the diversity of floating voices, from the intimacy of the palm of their hand.
The performance, Palm mask will take place on Saturday 21 October at Bétonsalon, between 5pm and 7pm.
Participants are asked to commit to attend all sessions.
No previous vocal experience is necessary.
Clara Schulmann
Clara Schulmann, author, researcher and art critic, will accompany this workshop with a basket of theoretical and sensitive tools available to the group, to aid and nourish the process of creation, sharing and writing. This basket will be sent to any participant who wishes to familiarize themselves with its contents before the workshop. The basket can continue to be filled with the various experiences of the group throughout the workshop. This experiment with the basket with Anna Holveck, Clara Schulmann and interested participants will be shared with the public on Saturday, October 14 at Bétonsalon, starting at 4pm.
Anna Holveck
Anna Holveck was born in 1993 and lives and works in Paris. As a visual artist, she uses performance, video and sound installation to explore the relationship between sound and voice production devices and space. Sometimes singing, sometimes sound engineer or sounding board, in her work the body listens to, translates or mimes the vibrations of the acoustic and political landscape in which it is embedded. Anna Holveck constructs immersive listening situations that involve both the person producing the sound and the person perceiving it, standing on a blurred boundary between ear and mouth. His work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, FR), the Fondation Pernod Ricard (Paris, FR), the Creux de l’Enfer (Thiers, FR), the Vitrine et les Réserves of the Frac Ile-de-France (Paris and Romainville, FR), the IAC – Institut d’art contemporain – Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes (FR), the Actoral – International Festival of Arts & Contemporary Writings (Marseille, FR) and the Instants Chavirés (Montreuil, FR). Several of his works joined the public collections of the Frac Ile-de-France in 2021 and the Frac Franche-Comté (Besançon, FR) in 2017. Her latest piece, produced in the basement of the IRCAM (Paris, FR), can currently be seen at the Musée d’art de Joliette (QC) as part of the group exhibition “Dissolving your ear plugs”. She will be in residence at Privas at the invitation of the IAC (FR), to make a film supported by the Fondation des Artistes and the Center National des Arts Plastiques and then at a long-term residence with the art center Le Lait (Albie, FR) in partnership with the isdaT – superior insitut of art and design of Toulouse (FR).
