Disrupting the Dominant Song

Chapter in ‘Sammelband’ Open Scriptures, Notation in Contemporary Artistic Practices in Europe and the Americas ed. Barbara Ventarola, Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2022. Proceedings from Keynote at International Symposium on Material Contemplations. Open Scriptures. International Colloquium on Notation. Contemporary Practices and Crossroads between Latin America and Europe, September 12-14.18 at National University in Mexico City, UNAM.

This text is a score that writes an essay from instructions that invite the unperformance of the dominant voice in the affirmative frame of plural participation. It is written in words, joined on horizontal lines, with punctuation and grammar, but offering also a vertical depth and an in-between of material and linguistic sense, to listen to, to fall in to, and to reperform in plural voices.
The score calls us into participation, not through the truth and obligation of language as a structural tool and signifier of a symbolic order and organisation, but through the love of taking part in its utterance: unorganized, haphazard and fluid. To speak, to breathe, to hum, to sing and listen in order to sound the space and the sense of articulation with the body, with bodies of different shapes, desires, fears and dreams. Thus it unperforms language through plurality and repetitions that bring the imagination of more improvised and speculative words to meaning: to agitate rather than make sense.