E-Land Total Sound, Iklectic Art Lab, London, 2023

 

E-Land Total Sound; an afternoon of sonic performances on the personal, contextual and relational; embodied aspects of sound. Understanding sound as an ever evolving, multidimensional reality. Growing from D/deaf and neuroqueer people and those with whom this resonates. With thanks to Jané Mackenzie for organising.

 

Contributors / Performers

  • Deaf Rave
  • Susanna Dye, Gerald Curtis & Martin Swan
  • IndoorGobin
  • Katherine Smith and I. Nakhla 
  • Derek Williams 
  • Jané Mackenzie 

‘100 Cans and B Flat Minor’, developed in collaboration with artist Katherine Smith

Tin Cans, Live vocals

As Smith navigates a pathway with the cans, the sounds of material body(s) fill the room. Nakhla begins to sing, harmonising, and improvising with the sounds Smith is making as they negotiate moving through the space. The work calls attention to the precariousness of neuroqueer bodies and subjectivities in economies of transit and nonvisible exchange, and continues the artists’ collaborative experiments into sound, moveable-sculpture, and the key of B flat minor.

Photographs by Cocoglitch

* Drawing on ideas in relation to ‘Total Communication’ as explained by Project Art Works as “artists work[ing] together in purposeful collaboration using total communication. Gesture, sound, signing and empathy allow for more expansive and freeing forms of connection.

 

*Neuroqueer is a verb: is an action, a doing word- rooted in the practice of queering (that is: subverting, disrupting, defying, liberating oneself from) from normativity and is necessarily intersectional in nature. This concept has grown out of the critical neurodiversity studies* that centers exploration of neurodivergent culture, ways of being, seeing, knowing and engaging in/with-the-world- that disrupt and challenge the normative ideal.

The term was coined by Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon and Nick Walker.

Text from www.queerundefined.com/search/neuroqueer /// https://neuroqueer.com/neuroqueer-an-introduction/