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"The voice as performance, act and body"

"The voice as performance, act and body"
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    • "The voice as performance, act and body"
  • 2007
  • video, color, sound
  • 11min, 34sec
This video documents VALIE EXPORT's performance at the Venice Biennale in 2007, from a perspective that takes in the entire scene live at the Arsenale. We see EXPORT having a laryngoscope guided through her nose by physician Erhard Suess, assisted by her life partner Robert Stockinger. In the background, four monitors display images of her glottis while EXPORT declaims a text about power, limitations and variety of vocal expression: "I've hardly formed a sound and already it's gone; it leaves its trace in the perception of my voice by the 'others'. The instrument that is the voice plays its melody. Power and powerlessness are compositions of the voice. My voice is the trace of my individual body as it is of my social body; it sews the parts, the sewing patterns of my ephemeral identities together, but it is not my own - it speaks for itself." Jo.S./V.E.