Clara Amaral: When I write dialogues I always know which voice is which voice even though inside my head I could say that all the voices are the same (voice).

20 minute presentation for AEROPONIC ACTS  - growing roots in air, DAI's 3 day marathon of lecture-perfomance acts, May 2019.

A reading of When I write dialogues I always know which voice is which voice even though inside my head I could say that all the voices are the same (voice).

Ana Teixeira Pinto, Rachel O’Reilly, Laura Harris and Hypatia Vourloumis responded to the question:

If I if I end up saying the words that you that you were saying will I will I become you?

Report by Ayesha Hameed:

We are handed a script as we walk in the naturally lit room and sit in a circle on the floor. The artist, seated in a chair, speaks without the script that we can read along to, describing the voice as a form of trespass, and the uses of voices and their attribution to bodies. She asks: ‘What are voices without bodies?’ And then describes practices of voicing and writing. What is a dialogue? The script is arranged like a score, or a poem. It is half-sung. The practice of reading and hearing is considered, and the threshold of utterance; the surreal displacement of repetition and déjà vu, and the you that is being addressed – the fragile and interpenetrated relationship in between. The artist recites from memory. She forgets her lines – or does she?  

Hypatia Vourloumis would have loved to have had more time to study the text, which she said evokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heterotopias in its refraction of the social through words as a literary verbal performance. She was struck by the sociality of the singular voice and how it brought other voices and cadences into the artist’s own.

The performance had Ana Texeira Pinto ask: ‘What is an inner voice, is there a dialogue that one has with it?’ She thought it had the sense of estrangement and dislike in encountering oneself in a picture or an audio recording and elicited the question:’ How then is the self constituted?’ Another issue she thought was evoked here was the mental space of the sheet of paper – a compelling exercise that pulls us into a mise en abyme of misrecognition and estrangement. 

Laura Harris said the presentation dynamized the singular voice and the positions marked and conveyed a sense of the DAI in speaking and reading together. 

Rachel O’Reilly thought the convergence around the present tense was striking. ‘In the sovereignty of the text and its performance, glimpses of the charismatic come through, and details are not flattened into the page,’ she said. ‘The performance plays between the charismatic and the automatic.’ 

About Clara Amaral