Thesis Supervisor: Doreen Mende

Thesis: Me and My Voice, Refugee

June 2011

ABSTRACT

"In this essay I will try to write exclusively about my voice which has a multilayered structure that has been an ultimate pivotal fundament in the context of my work as an artistic practice. It deals with several issues which are voice, language, deafness, singularity and estrangement which has been profoundly amplified to me since I moved in the Netherlands in 2009. With these issues, the voice and the other elements try to combine with each other and construct their own controversial structure, penetrating with a concept of shame as a basis.

First of all, I try to describe about my linguistic condition which is an outset of this essay that needs to be informed beforehand. Most of my analysis comes from my personal experiences alongside with shame which have been propounding some problematic points for my artistic practice. I take shame as a dominant element for this essay and refer to an article; The Broken Circuit: An Interview with Sina Najafi, David Serlin and Lauren Berlant. Constantly, I try to expand this analysis to the concept of Refugee in the last part of this essay.

In the first part of the body of this essay, I try to depict my experiences that happened with my voice (or action of utterance), and try to further analyze Mladen Dolar’s term of acousmatic voice intertwined with a shamanistic perspective, and my social activity with my voice and its exploitation in economical terms.

In the second part of the body of this essay, I try to investigate the politics of lecture based on the precarious existence of presence in the lecture and the physical inability and linguistic weakness that are excluded from the institutional trajectory, that is, my experience and me. Constantly, I try to divide the meaning of Refugee into two meanings which are focused on the socio-political and ontological perspective. This classification is based on the progression of the refugee which is already articulated in the preface and the first part of this essay. Therefore, it is interesting to study how the multilayered voice intersects with Gilles Deleuze’s ‘marginalized sense‘ and also inevitably associated with the concept of refugee as intertwined with the socio-political, affective and ontological perspective."

Author: Yunjoo Kwak