Dunlop, Jane Frances ORCID: 0009-0000-4350-5381 (2023) Sonic Wandering in New Landscapes. Gertrude Stein and sonic performativity in Eglė Budvytytė’s Songs from the Compost: mutating bodies, exploding stars. In: Performing Studies international conference (PSi) #28 Uhambo Luyazilawula: Embodied Wandering Practices, 2nd - 5th Aug, 2023, Johannesburg. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

In this paper, I will use Gertrude Stein’s concept of the ‘landscape' to consider the performative effects of soundscape through an analysis of Eglė Budvytytė’s 2020 video work Songs from the Compost: mutating bodies, exploding stars. Stein’s ‘landscape’ is a performance tactic she sets against the ‘nervousness’ of storytelling in the theatre: ‘all these things that might have been a story […] as a landscape they are just there” (Stein, p. 131). ‘Landscape’ locates the meaning and value of a work in the relations it stages. Read through contemporary feminist theories (Ahmed; Barad; Braidotti; Haraway; Russell; Tsing), I will argue that ‘landscape’ becomes tactic for describing situated and intraconnected thinking. In Songs from the Compost, the artist’s autotuned voice builds an eerie and hypnotic sonic landscape over the twisting barely human bodies on screen as they trace a speculative theory through fungal future, pastpresent human destruction and metaphors of endosymbiosis. This voice - and the slow electronic score - pull on the listener’s attention until ‘all these things that might have been a story […] are just there”. In this sonic ‘landscape’, the sensation of “just there” allows the listener to undertake changing ‘wanderings’ that journey across past, present, and future; through messy entanglement of the digital and synthetic, human and non-human. Ultimately, it is through this performative wandering that the listener not only encounters but enacts the work’s speculative and critically utopian epistemology. This paper is part of my ongoing wanderings between the crises of knowledge that have come to define the last decade: the rise of ‘alternative facts’ that undermine and destabilise expertise, the necessity of expanded epistemologies that dismantle imperialist epistle regimes while accounting for non-human life and the increasingly complex AI systems for which datasets stand in as knowledge.

Item Type:	Conference or Conference Paper (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	voice studies; theatricality; landscape
Subjects:	N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN2000 Dramatic representation. The Theater
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Design (DES)
Last Modified:	11 Mar 2024 13:26
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/46179

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