Walking & Talking Aloud in Urban Spaces – the voice as memory and the War Machine
Marion Velasco ROLIM - PPGAV–IA– Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.
Versão para o inglês: Mariana Bandarra.
Paper apresentado na 7th International Deleuze Studies Conference Istanbul, 2014 - Models, Machines and Memories. Sessão 3 - Painel: X4 - Performance Art, coordenada pelo ator e dramaturgo canadense, Martin Julien. ITÜ Faculty of Architecture. Taskisla. 14/07/14, 15h10>16h40. Istanbul, Turkey.
As an artist, I investigate the immateriality of Performance Art, combining sound and mixed technology to create performative actions that blend in or stem from everyday life situations.
For this reason, I am interested in the experience, in the presence and resonance of the body through voice (spoken, sung, processed) as well as through the sound events the body engages with, captures, and produces.
Seeking for the unpredictable and leaning on chance, I practice the walk as a strategy to find places and sounds that become fundamental pieces in the creation of works and actions.
In my understanding, the walker, with his or her practice, by integrating themselves to a sound context, also helps build it, as described by Brandon LaBelle (2012),
"Stepping out from the house, the acoustical view of the sidewalk opens up, which is dotted with rhythmical patterning drummed out by the step in all its metered and fluctuating dynamic. To follow this is to track the marks and scuffs amidst the urban texture, forming a map of so many itineraries. From the daily stroll to the determined walker, the cartography of the step also traces out the audible events surrounding and aiding pedestrian movement. Rhythm, in piecing together the heat of the sound wave with the materiality of the built environment, sculpts out a time-space figure whose energies temporally demarcate the city.” (LaBelle, 2012: 105-106)
Deleuze (2006:47) believes that lines are “constitutional parts of the things and events. Therefore everything has its geography, its cartography, its diagram."
In the woven fabric that forms the city, beyond the segments, circulation, circuits and the ways of using urban space, obscure connections and seemingly meaningless signals and ligne de fuite are created, since, as pointed out by LaBelle (2012),
"The city is also a noise as well as a text, a culture as well as a map, a reverberant terrain as well as a space full of signs; a history surfacing through government policy as well as the potent sonority that envelopes everyday life. (...).” (LABELLE, 2012:108)
Therefore, the crossing of signs, the rumors of memory and other events that make up the city's everyday life can be read.
Travessa do Fala-Só, which loosely translates as "Lonely Talker Lane", was found in other lines of roaming: in virtual routes through Google Map-associated websites, while I was planning a trip to Lisbon, where I was to present a paper at the Sixth International Deleuze Studies Conference, "the territory in-between" (1).
The intriguing name of the Travessa – which pays tribute to a talkative resident, but at the same time, keeps him anonymous, made me want to visit the place and create a performative action, whose proposition seemed to have been already given: – Cross the place talking to oneself.
Some provocation would be possible in the experiment: “go from one point to another” out loud, and building, in a different manner, the situation that had taken place in another time.
While researching on the resident the Travessa was named after, I found a Portuguese video feature investigating the origins of some unusual street names in Lisbon. Travessa do Fala-Só was one of these, but in the statements collected, the identity of the "old man" who talked to himself, as well as the contents of such talk, were left untouched, tangled in the memory of the city (2).
Speculations on the Voice
Paul Zumthor (2007:83) states that the voice is a symbolic place par excellence; but a place that can only defined "in terms of relationships, separations or articulations between subject and object, between One and the Other”.
Voice also creates a sense of "at home" – an issue brought up by Deleuze & Guattari in the concept of Ritornelo, which Zumthor (2007:85) explains as a "feeling of sociability. By hearing a voice of emitting ours, we feel, we declare to no longer be alone in the world". Precisely, because “voice, using the language to say something, speaks itself, it positions itself as a presence" and, also, because "what matters most deeply to voice is that the word to which it is the media is enunciated as a remembrance". (Zumthor, 2007:63-64).
However, the symbolic and communicative power of voice -- presence, articulation, disposition to connect with remembrance, is not free from normalizations, and is model by a series of conventions, just like other instances of social behavior.
Over time, different cultures have agreed upon the act of talking to oneself out lout in the street, in public spaces and transportation, being associated to lack of manners, mental pathology and other deviations, and so this act is practiced, for a variety of reasons, by those who do not comply with the norms.
Over the last few decades, an interesting situation can be observed in the streets of big cities: people alone sitting in public spaces, walking, and driving cars while talking and singing out loud.
The new communication and entertainment technologies that favor mobility and multitasking authorize people, through compact electronic devices, often worn on the body, with a wireless system, to talk and hum over a music file or radio sound. At times, the sound leaks from the headphones and compact earpieces, exposing a reason or revealing, live, the other party of the conversation.
Even if we do not find it strange to see someone talking to themselves, high volumes in specific places can be bothersome. Because of that, the act of talking out loud in the street, whether or not it is mediated by technology, can still be looked down upon and considered impolite.
Perhaps the most enchanting and surprising aspect of this is still the occupation of the public space by the collective voice, by its "nomadic potential", because it restores, as Deleuze (2012:64) puts it, "a smooth space or a way to be in the space as if it were smooth" and by its "swirling or spinning movement", which refers to the war machine. (Examples: football fans, riots, political protests, drunk youth leaving parties, etc.).
Zumthor (2005) also underscores the importance and the intensity of the collective voice, when he states that
“(...) in the large gatherings of crowds, the meeting itself is a moment, a space-time entity of a passionate nature; an intense, psychic space-time, in which oral poetry plays, simultaneously, a declarative role and a concentration role, an explosion of energies." (ZUMTHOR, 2005:90)
Going back to the lonely talk, the issues aforementioned reveal a few problems about this lonely talk the Travessa is named after.
I understand the lonely talk of the "old man" on Travessa do Fala Só, as a maladjustment in the established model for the use of voice, i.e., this is a ligne de fuite from everyday life, but one that, by repetition, has become a habit.
The "old man" might be talking to himself out loud, but this situation reveals that the people who lived in his surroundings was listening, they were the ones who helped popularize and name the situation, culminating in its territorialization as a street name.
Spiral time, smooth space and voice as war machine
Deleuze (....:....),defines time as a tangled labyrinth, a mass and a spiral swirl, with its “leaps, accelerations, ruptures and, speed decreases” and infinite variation.
This changes what is understood as memory, which no longer reconstructs things, but rather unfolds and interconnects with different times. With that, memory takes on a multiple character, one that creates and produces present and future.
Taking on space, Deleuze and Guattari (2006) present the war machine as
"a linear assemblage which is constructed on ligne de fuite. In this sense, the war machine does not at all have war as its object; it has as its object a very special space, smooth space, which it composes, occupies and propagates. Nomadism is precisely this combination "war machine-smooth space." [...] A war machine tends to be revolutionary, or artistic, much more so than military. (DELEUZE, 2006:48)
“Smooth space [nomad] is precisely the space of the smallest deviation [...]” (D&G, 2012:40). If air is considered to be smooth space and is occupied by the “intensities, winds and noises [...], the sound and tactile qualities forces” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2012:198), I risk saying that voice, which blows syllables, words and sounds, which projects and propagates, depending on its use, can be regarded as a weapon, since "everything that launches or that is launched is, in principle, a weapon” (D&G, 2012:77) and as a poetic, artistic war machine.
The performative action “Aloud on Lonely Talker Lane” set out to build, in a different way, a situation that happened in another time; to be in the space and cross it talking out loud to oneself, thus activating the multiple, creator character of memory.
About Aloud on Lonely Talker Lane
In Lisbon, I walked around Travessa do Fala-Só -- in the tourist district of Baixa Pombalina -- Praça dos Restauradores, Calçada da Glória, Bairro Alto, and worked on what would be said and blended with the location's soundscape, leaving the exploration of Travessa do Fala-Só to be done on the day the piece was set to be performed.
The text was created one day before the piece was performed, late one afternoon, by the Tejo River, and it contains references to what I was seeing and hearing at that place, as well as to situations witnessed in other places of Lisbon. With that, I understand that, during the performance, this space-time of the city was transported into Travessa do Fala-Só.
So, in the afternoon of July 22, 2013, I drew a path across the longest, narrowest stretch of Travessa do Fala-Só – which has four entrances and exits, and walked that path aline, reading the prepared text aloud. During the time of the performative action, I operated the equipment and said the following words (3):
“If you can't take photos..., vision, hearing, smell, tact are not over.
And I say:
A bird feather tries to take flight from the rock. The moss hold it down. A thick chain lies ahead.
The wind helps it change places. Birds leap from the sloped rock. The banks of the Tejo look brown today.
The sun goes down on the city's back. The feather changes place, once more. Direction, too. [It's summertime. I'm going back to winter tomorrow]
The waves break (in parts, in stereo?) on the constructed shore. [Behind me > the voices of two African men (one wearing white headphones). To the left, on the speakers of the riverside bar > a flamenco guitar is playing Noise from the wheels of a baby stroller, bikes, shoes against the stone of the sidewalk
The green moss is alive It is brown. It is carpet. Now, a piece of plastic hops on top of it - quicker than the feather, it does not let itself get caught.
"From Tejo one sets out to the world" The world comes in through Tejo and through air. The waters are folded as they arrive, foaming on the edges. Infinitely, they respond, wave after wave. [Now it's the sandals (behind me), the Africans... The reggae from the bar speakers]
Heat! I wait for the moon to appear.
A soft breeze! Dizzy from the mix of wine além Tejo, ginginha and panaché.
[A male voice (American, metallic) echoes down the river: - Yeah, yeah... oh! Yeah]
The girl before him, dressed in black, poses like the little mermaid of Copenhagen. The buildings from Bairro Alto darken the sun. Everything moves -- comes and goes. The full moon has risen over the rosy layer of pollution. There is something here, at the end of the day...: the reflections of the sun that appear on the buildings, in unlikely spots, Overlapping, on the streets. Reflections from the glass? From the glazed tiles? What about the shadows?
A young man walks by and his T-shirt reads > SAILING CLOSE THE WIND. sailing close the Wind. All good, all right..., all good all right..., allgoodallright – replies the trolley.” (VELASCO, 2013)
After the last verse of the text was spoken, two men and a woman came into the street, talking. I kept the record of their voices and adopted the situation as a closing to the action.
Aloud on Lonely Talker Lane is the event itself and the documents generated by it: a poetic text; a sound piece containing the spoken text(4) – which has the full time of the action, with no cuts and with the changes that naturally took place in the speech, along the path. In order to intensify the singularities of these sound points (words overlapping, tone changes, interruptions for breathing, repetition, etc.), various sound effects (plug-ins) from audio editing software Nuendo 5 were applied, such as: Reverber, Restoration, Modulation Chorus, Delay, Envelope. Additionally, self-portraits, photographs, video and QR code were generated, the latter consisting of a link to the image of the path, on a Google map.
The documents generated during the performative action are what make that space-time available to the audience, with the voices, wind, noises and images. However, it should be noted that, according to Paul Zumthor (2007), there is a prior communication that takes place between voice and ear. Therefore, my first time listening to the performance, was, as the medieval theorist puts it,
“Voice implies ear. But there are two simultaneous ears, once the two pairs of ears are in the presence of one another, the speaker's and the listener's. (...) The ear, in effect, directly captures the space around it, both what comes from behind and what is ahead. Vision also captures a space, certainly; but an oriented space, whose orientation requires particular body movements. This is why the body, through hearing, is present in itself, a presence that is not only special, but intimate. By listening to myself, I self-communicate. My voice, heard, reveals me to myself, no less -- although in a different way -- than to the Other. (ZUMTHOR, 2007:86-87)
Aloud on Lonely Talker Lane, in the format: photos, sound piece, and text, has integrated the exhibition ALTERAÇÃO (Alteration), curated by Clóvis Martins Costa, which was open to visitation at Espaço Cultural FEEVALE - Novo Hamburgo/RS, in southern Brazil, from October 8, 2013 e to December 20, 2013 and is part of my PhD research in Visual Poetics, at the Visual Arts Graduate Program – Institute of Arts of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, in Porto Alegre, state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
Final remarks
Those who talk alone are primarily talking to themselves, because "the voice, regardless of what it says, offers delight" (Zumthor, 2007:63).
The voice moves in the smooth space of air and becomes a disturbance when it is found outside of what has been delimited as its social use, thus turning into a weapon and a nomad war machine.
In the case of the "old man" at Travessa do Fala-Só, the event was fixed on the location and repetition, causing the people who lived there to hear him, name him (however vaguely) and territorialize the situation as a street name.
The performative action “Aloud on Lonely Talker Lane” creates a ligne de fuite on Travessa do Fala-Só, by crossing into different times. By walking along the lane talking aloud, the multiple character of memory, creator and producer of present and future, is activated.
I believe the negotiations of "here-and-now" in the polyphonic urban space altered, for some time, the everyday life at Travessa do Fala-Só. The voice speaking aloud acquired its power as an artistic war machine, causing the artist and the location to grow, "in the sense that the nomad makes the desert no less than he is made by it", as stated by Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus - Volume 5.
(1) I traveled to Lisbon with the financial support of PPGAV–IA-UFRGS and MINC/SEFIC/Brazil, to present the paper Small Ritornellos in sound piece Jungle Metal , which was part of the Sonic Assemblages table of the Conference, at Universidade de Lisboa, from July 8 to 10, 2013.
(2)Travessa do Fala-Só: http(Access on: February 25, 2014)
(3)The voice was captured using a ZOOM-H4 audio recording device. Due to problems with the operation of various equipment, in the same day a second run of the path took place, to capture moving image and photographs using the camera on the Samsung GALAXY - S4 device.
(4)Aloud on Lonely Talker Lane sound piece
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