Our a/v work Signals screens in Athens, accompanied by a live performance by Mad Kate on Saturday 12 April.
Created for Washington DC’s Sound Scene Festival 2021 and its theme EMERGE, Signals was supported by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, and the Goethe-Institut.
Signals explores the notion of performativity in the form of codes, signs, drag, and masks in order to emerge from the darkness as visible.
Signals become methods of translation, channels through which our voices become audible and understood. Bodies emerge into forms which are recognized and codified; modes through which we can be understood and called into subjectivity. An audio work and a video essay, Signals explores the process of emergence especially as it relates to the a/Artist into cultural spaces of power, those who hold or desire to hold the microphone.
Using multiple distinct voices and perspectives, both sung and written, Signals explores the process through which one emerges through the implementation of signals like masks, codes, dress, and language in order to achieve audibility, visibility and thus access. What is this process of emergence? Who stands at the gate? What is gained and lost in this process?