2024 ~ Meditations#13.3 ~ Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa

DAI invited guest writers Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa, Harun Morrison, and Giulia Crispiani to meditate on specific parts of COOP SUMMIT 2024 which took place in Essaouira in Morocco on September 5, 6, 7, 2025. Five COOP study groups forged their collaborative research into an assemblage of public happenings. 

In the following meditation Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa takes us back to COOP study group The Word and the Wound's ...And Then I Opened My Mouth. 

The Shadowy Side of the Platonic Sun

Prologue

Reading the COOP Summit’s presentation note, I wondered how this “assemblage of happenings” could summon up forms of thought and artistic practices that would challenge Plato’s metaphysical scenario. The parallel may not be obvious, but the sea urchin, the emblem of this program of happenings, because of its particular link to light, seems to embody a force opposed to, interconnected with and complementary to the sun. While it was long thought that the sea urchin lacked a photoreceptor, research has shown that it can move according to light and shadow. The modalities of this light perception make it a singular photosensitive creature. They indicate that the animal’s entire body forms a kind of eye. It detects sunlight, which passes through the filter of marine waters and is transformed. Absorbed, diffused, diffracted, the light appears soft and enveloping. It is no longer a question of the sun as a vertical force with uncontested power over the visible world, but of a more horizontal light; more sensory than rational; more carnal than Platonic. 

This image of horizontality is reinforced by the movement of the sea urchins, which depends on sunlight. Their spikes are said to indicate the direction of the light, like beams that concentrate the sun's rays and gather its radiance. The sea urchin's renowned ability to appropriate, assimilate and integrate nature's energies makes it a prodigy of transformation, able to convert ingested dead organisms into energy for other organisms. Participating in the life-death cycle, the sea urchin is thus linked to the idea of transmutation and creation. The metaphor of the sea urchin reverses the vertical light-truth concept. Moreover, the principles of reason and knowledge make way for the emergence of a knowledge of the depths and a regenerative power.

In vivo practice. Between materiality and sensoriality

...And Then I Opened My Mouth is the first happening to kick off the three-day COOP Summit 2024. This performance is the culmination of a long-term project by The Word and the Wound study group, led by author and performer Snejanka Mihaylova and Frédérique Bergholtz, founder and director of If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, a curatorial platform dedicated to the performance art. Both tutors are active in multi-disciplinary research on the body at the intersection of performance art, visual arts and the history of art and ideas.

What happens in the first few minutes determines what comes afterwards. Starting with simple instructions focusing on concentration and body awareness, the warm-up heralds the somatic and sensory experience that will unfold through various physical states connoted by the materiality and sensoriality of the bodies. These states, which could be described as visceral, arise from bodily responses of an emotional and physical nature. They involve the body’s reflective process, through its sensitivities and intelligences, but also the way in which the body informs and orients reflection on the performance in progress. 

Breath, movement, sound and voice, in latent or nascent states, carve out in each body a cartography of listening and presence. The proximity of the participants creates an intimate space, where each person must be within reach of all the others in order to fully receive their bodily and vocal expression, in a physical and acoustic interconnection with each other and with their environment. 

Teaching practice and practice of transmission 

The research carried out by The Word and the Wound focuses on practice, its applications and sources in everyday life, with particular reference to the relationship between artistic practice and context. It explores how everyday gestures, human relationships, familiar environments and situations of pleasure or discomfort can relate to the intention and process of creation. In this sense, particular attention is paid to the exploration of an individual daily practice that enables each person to mobilize their internal energy for the benefit of a more intense, more active external impulse: listening to and welcoming the group. The body, its disorders, its differences and its movements are at the heart of the reflection on artistic practice, bringing about significant changes. This reflection is based on a conviction that is as simple to formulate as it is rare in the field of arts education: thinking from and through practice. 

This perspective advocates the experience of the being and its response to the world as the guiding principle of research. It aims to overcome the old dualisms of theory and practice, action and idea, body and mind. It translates into a desire to anchor practice in a perceptive, bodily and sensory experience of the creative process, which remains primarily based on individual experimentation that can be shared collectively. This perceptive experience is not that of an individual constructing the world through representation, but is the experience of an embodied subject, a subject who is a body both known and unpredictable, a body embedded in the world, a living body, a body in motion, with its intelligences and affections. The Word and the Wound helps us to understand the lived meaning of artistic practice: a contrasting mix of ideas and actions, complemented by experience – experimentation – with the world. From this perspective, practice becomes a concrete, operative tool for building relationships in which ordinary life shows its creative capacity. Knowledge derived from practice opens up a space that complements academic research. It is likely to induce other forms of understanding and to open up to multiple forms of knowledge, enabling to work collectively and to create a collective work of art.

On the threshold of speech and song

The work on and from the voice is the result of this reflection on the sensitive data that ordinary life shares with artistic practice. It is conducted experimentally in the field of art education, even before that of artistic performance. The tutors Frédérique Bergholtz and Snejanka Mihaylova implement a methodology drawn from their experience and expertise in the field of performance art, borrowing from diverse disciplines and techniques such as singing, theater, dance and somatic practices, which enable the elaboration of knowledge rooted in genealogies of transmission and creativity of which they are the transmitters. The voice responds to this challenge, which is to find means of collective communication and open up new spaces for expression through sensory and bodily practices. It is considered in its materiality and phonetic dimension; that is, a material body that produces sound and matter (timbre, color of the voice). It is also perceived as a movement, a power carried and given rhythm by the breath, based on a dynamic awareness of the body and its living materials: emotions, sensations, perceptions, expectations, anticipations, memories and latencies. 

The voice summoned by ...And Then I Opened My Mouth stands at the threshold of speech, which designates and puts in order, and at the limit of song, which puts in form. It takes us back to a moment prior to all language, belief, discourse and form. It is a voice that calls, through the practice of listening, for availability to oneself and to others. It reveals an intention to relate. It manifests itself as an inner voice—individual—and also as an outer voice—multiple and different—that of the group, whose interconnections are facilitated by the resonance of a shared practice. Because it involves an “I” and a “we,” this voice brings together bodies, affects and creative intentions. It consolidates a community made up of a sum of individualities and solitudes, but also an assemblage of singular, deeply empathetic and collective experiences.

The shared, iterated, altered voice

In A più voci. Filosofia dell'espressione vocale, Italian feminist philosopher and theorist Adriana Cavarero analyzes the privileged place of voice and speech in Platonic metaphysics. She points out that the voice occupies an important place, but because it involves sound and the body (two components through which the uniqueness of the person speaking through the logos is manifested), the logos must free itself from it so that only the semantic component—meaning—can exercise unquestionable sovereignty. [1] Adriana Cavarero goes further in her analysis, pointing out that this metaphysics tends not only to erase the materiality of the voice, its bodily manifestation, sonority and sensory qualities, but also the relational and communicative power of any vocal performance. [2] This capacity of the voice to initiate and instruct relationship is particularly effective in the vocal polyphony experimented with ...And Then I Opened My Mouth.

Cavarero's writings and reflections on embodied, non-semantic vocal phenomena are major philosophical sources that have informed The Word and the Wound’s explorations of the voice—blown, sung, spoken—and of vocality. The notion of vocality, elaborated by Katherine Meizel, [3] encompasses everything that is produced and perceived as vocal; that is, everything that is vocalized, enabling us to conceive the voice beyond the words it conveys, its materiality, or its production techniques. The notion of vocality thus goes beyond the voice. It includes “the entire experience of the speaker, the singer and the listener; it takes into account all the physiological, psychoacoustic and socio-political dynamics that shape our perception of ourselves and of others”; [4] even perhaps the perception of ourselves in resonance with—our—others. These dynamics reveal multiple issues where the voice, as an embodied instrument, intersects with what it accomplishes, namely, a constant negotiation of our processes of expression and communication of the sensible, the intelligible and the singular.

The performance ...And Then I Opened My Mouth, seizes on the multiplicity of these flows of consciousness and takes shape in the thickness that weave these links of diverse natures and qualities. In an ambition to link together different voices (both singular and collective) and to embrace diversity, the performance reveals a polyphony from which harmony and unison can emerge, as well as cacophony and conflict. The voice carried by one is heard and vibrated by the other, which, allowing itself to be affected by its resonance and imprint, repeats its vibration elsewhere, differently. It doubles the initial intention, extending its reach and perpetuating its effects. This reproduced voice organizes the space and engages the body in a search, a walk that leads to listening, to feeling, to touching and to the profound integration of the composite and plural dimension of the living.

Critical polyphonies

In ...And Then I Opened My Mouth, polyphony appears through the unexpected play of vocal improvisation, with its asymmetries and pluralities, that blur individualities, identities and hierarchies. This game requires an escape from the systems of thought that forge fixed norms and representations, to allow the sensitive experience of being in the world to emerge. This experience is called upon to be replayed, surpassed, amplified and multiplied by another in an infinite relationship of reciprocity that establishes the possibility of a different arrangement of knowledge, based on the order of experience rather than reflection. Showing in body and voice the unspeakable nature of the experience of transmitting embodied knowledge is undoubtedly what ...And Then I Opened My Mouth achieves most precisely and most radically. 

This participatory and engaging approach to voice in the production and sharing of knowledge revives one of Cavarero's main preoccupations, which is, on the one hand, to think of voice in its social-political and philosophical relations and, on the other, to rehabilitate its subversive power. Her thinking opens up the possibility of a more inclusive and pluralist form of political relations. She invites us to consider a progressive politics that would involve the necessary rehabilitation of the voice in its multiple singularity and plurality, in order to bypass the current of a single authoritative voice. And this is undoubtedly one of the fundamental contributions of her work. 

...And Then I Opened My Mouth responds to this political stand by sharing the same concern to escape any fixed position. By demonstrating the possibility of disrupting the distribution of voices and the role assignments, this performance repeatedly refers us to a relational space that exists only at the moment of vocal invocation. Cavarero calls this space “the absolute local,” which she describes as “a taking-place of politics that has no predefined borders, nor any fixed or sacred confines. It is not a nation, nor a fatherland, nor a land... It is a relational space that happens with the event of this communication and, together with it, disappears.” [5]

If, as Cavarero demonstrates, the political act and event are ephemeral,  ...And Then I Opened My Mouth proves that the artistic act and practice are the same: ephemeral and political. Firstly, because they are embodied in the unstable form of performance, but also because they find form, in the sense of body and matter, in the refusal to be assigned to a position dictated by any consensus in which art and activism might be inscribed. This resonates with other legacies that have nourished the group’s thinking, which are contained in the famous formula attributed to the Russian-American non-conformist feminist: “If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.” Like a revolutionary mantra, her voice resonates, envelops, circulates and gives vitality to the irrevocable call to engage the body, connoted by materiality and sensoriality, in the configuration of knowledge and communities producing experiences that are simultaneously somatic, sensitive and political.

Notes:

[1] Adriana Cavarero, A più voci. Filosofia dell’espressione vocale, (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003), 272.
[2] Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Trans. Paul A. Kottman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 296.
[3] Katherine Meizel, “Une voix puissante: enquête sur la vocalité et l’identité.” Volume ! La revue des musiques populaires 16, no. 2/ 17, no. 1 (2020): 183-197 [online], https://journals.openedition.org/volume/7803.
[4] Meizel, “Une voix puissante,” 184.
[5] Adriana Cavarero. For More than One Voice, 204-5. Quoted in Sarah K. Burgess and Stuart J Murray’s book review, Philosophy and Rhetoric 39, no. 2 (2006): 166-169.

About the author: Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa

Read more on ...And Then I Opened My Mouth and COOP SUMMIT 2024

Read more about the 2023-2024 COOP study group ~ The Word and the Wound