2. What the Voice Carries
Hybrid
Meeting ID: 945 7005 7157
Passcode: 944651
Panellists: Adriana Minu, Adam Nasser Benmakhlouf, Grace Denton
Chair: Claire Jeantils
Adriana Minu (Online) | Erratic and erotic voice - introduction to an ADHD music composition practice
Abstract: This performative presentation introduces my voice-led composition practice of erratic and erotic voice: an experimental approach to music composition developed through my embodied experience as an ADHD woman. Using this body that refused being performatively farmed, I developed erratic and erotic voice as a corporeal epistemology (Schulze, 2018), a sensory sonic practice that uses voice to lean into the ADHD body's natural bio-rhythmic states. The reclamation of attentional drifts, digressions, tangents, both hyper focusing in and 'zoning out', pulled by sensory specifics of indeterminate quality, has helped carve expressive routes traversed by a voice that fuels this inter-material vibrational practice (Eidsheim, 2015). This approach collects visceral utterances, held back or explosive expressive moments often attached to intensities felt in the body. In my practice I ask - what is creatively needed to be alongside these intensities, reclaiming them as onto-epistemic creative forces.
The work aligns itself with practice-based research that consider technique as knowledge ( Spatz, 2015) and argues for “wider, less essentialist and more practice-based ontological perspectives” (Assis, 2018).
In this presentation I employ the strategies that erratic and erotic voice is built on both in form and content, drifting and following tangents through three examples of artistic work that showcase the practice in action. In ‘Experimental Karaoke Juice Machine’ (ExKaJuMa, 2023) I bring forward my body as performer, taking sound itself as an excuse for voice to digress. In ‘Ecstasies of things’ (2022), I blend my performativity with someone else’s, co-creating a sensory séance for fidget objects, two performers and four audience members. In ‘sound-mattering study: elisabeth in the hague’, (2020) I remove my body from the performative act, extrapolating instead a method for a musician to follow. In this last piece a musician drifts through their domestic space using the sound of solo trumpet.
Navigating through this range of practice, I foreground here some specific creative approaches that support my neurodivergent body to be itself.
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Adam Nasser Benmakhlouf | Problems with the voice are not about the voice
Abstract: In my paper, I present my work as a researcher and artist-writer whose primary medium is experimental writing. In particular, I will discuss in depth my neuroqueer writing aesthetic as enacting a critical development of the ideas of Dr Nick Walker, expanding beyond the psy-disciplinary bias characterising the neuroqueer paradigm so far.
The experimental writing I produce as an artist concerns primarily moments of critical embodiment, with special focus on collective acts of choreography and sound practices within experimental workshops conceived and delivered by various artist-facilitators across major art institutions, designed for minoritised, marginalised and oppressed bodies—I myself am a working class, disabled, mixed race, nonbinary queer. My writing which extends and is possessed by this bodying (as I call it) is carefully crafted to achieve cutting and insightful impact through lyrical-theoretical prose which is boldly neuroqueer, incisively embodied, personal, unflinchingly political, energetic, and stunningly original. Attempting to undo the neurotypical conventions of writing, I intelligently and convincingly hold paradox and contradiction through beautiful elucidations of the multiplicity of sensation, thinking, status and feeling charging the neurodivergent body with radical possibility for emancipation for all.
In 20 minutes, I will perform my new work Problems with the voice are not about the voice, preceded by a succinct, lucid delivery of my critical framework which creates a platform for my own practice and further contributions by others of writerly methods of neuroqueer, socio-psychosomatic expression and enquiry. I coin the term socio-psychosomatic in order critically and definitively to enmesh psychosomatic theories of neuroqueerness within a wider societal framework. I do this through essential new readings of Dr Nick Gordon alongside the radical psycho-theoretical project Public Feelings in the USA, and Black Radical, women of colour feminist and crip theorists Sara Ahmed, Ann Cvetkovich, Fred Moten, Nancy Mairs and Denise Riley.
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Grace Denton | All Facing in the Same Direction: Capturing (some) voices of the diagnosis boom
Abstract: As part of my practice-based research, I made All Facing in the Same Direction in 2023, an artwork that features self-filmed testimonies from participants who have received, or are seeking, a late-stage diagnosis of either ADHD or Autism. The film sets their conversational confessions against performance footage, in which I enact and trial many ‘ADHD hacks’.
In this presentation I will play a muted version of the film as a backdrop, and read a paper in which I unpack the often-intuitive processes that built the work. Constellating around diagnosis as both a mystifying barrier, and a key to unlocking self-knowledge, the film nods towards Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism, in which ‘something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.’ The film follows several voices as they self-diagnose, find relief and understanding, and then run the gauntlet of the waiting lists and hidden traps of the psychiatric complex, possibly eventually encountering some feeling of sovereignty and self-actualisation.
My research investigates the myriad applications of the term sovereignty - so often used to entice individuals towards an emotive political cause or sell a particular wellness doctrine – and attempts to dissect why I hyper-fixated on this term, when self-governance remains such a constant struggle.
My project coincided with the much-maligned boom in ADHD diagnoses, perhaps accelerated by the introspective years of the Covid-19 lockdown. So many of us were moving towards the relatively new language of neurodiversity, trying to express (or if necessary imitate) the criteria used to grant meagre fragments of support.
This paper posits that ADHD itself is a mechanism within my creative practice, adding to a growing body of work around crip authorship and affordance by Ellen Samuels, Arseli Dokumaci, Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez. The film can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/ln6hhXMgl7k
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Speaker Bios:
Adriana Minu: Liberated from the need for coherence, motivated instead by sensory precision determined through pleasure, Adriana creates radical sound works that challenge audiences and performers to inhabit modes of being that are attentionally diverse and sensorially engaged. Originally from Romania, she is an artist and doctoral researcher at University of Glasgow where she teaches improvisation and experimental music practice, championing embodied ways of knowing. She has shown works both as performer and composer accross Europe and Canada. In the past, Adriana has been a visiting researcher at Concordia University hosted by the Performance Arts Research Cluster. She has recently trained in NY and LA to become a Fitzmaurice Voicework teacher and privately teaches this trauma-informed approach to voice.
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Adam Nasser Benmakhlouf: Adam Benmakhlouf (they/them) is a working class, mixed race, neurodivergent, disabled, nonbinary queer working who has been working prolifically for over a decade across academia, national and international art press, experimental art writing, performance, publishing, community organising and workshop facilitation. Their work has been exhibited in major public and international institutions and published in leading periodicals including Frieze and Art Monthly. They are currently in receipt of a prestigious five-year funding award by the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities, and in the second year of their Teaching Fellowship in Contemporary Art Theory at University of Edinburgh.
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Grace Denton: Grace Denton is an artist researcher who just finished her PhD: ‘The Nominally Sovereign Body: A practice-based exploration of the language of self-governance through the prism of ADHD’ at Northumbria University. Her research analyses the point at which we put language to experience, and engage in collective mythmaking around health, wellbeing, and political influence. It harnesses neurodivergence as methodology to generate artworks articulated through moving image, performance, radio broadcast, installation and craft. Grace co-runs a weekly online session for other neurodivergent artists and researchers called Making Time, and remains an active member of the Cultural Negotiation of Science research group.
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Zoom Meeting ID: 945 7005 7157
Passcode: 944651