Un/voiced

This intervention will investigate interactions between (strident-though-inaudible) inner voices and (unhearing-though-straining) internal ears. It intends to explicate the soundless interjections of textual unvoices in artists’ moving image works of the past five years. The analysis will centre on Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s 2015 film, Promised Lands: in which performances of ventriloquism, illegibility and indecipherability, inter- and sub-titling, litanies of negation, linguistic opacity, vocal expressivity and anti-colonial fictioning are marshalled to trouble a history of displacements and dislocations between the European and African continents. In Promised Lands, over twenty minutes and seven chapters, voice and textual unvoice move in and out of synchronisation. As what is audible and what is legible variously peel apart, generate friction, and fall into mutual supplementarity, Promised Lands unsettles expectations about the testimonial capacities of the ‘living voice’, and, too, the dynamic potentiality of the word-as-read. Much will be made of pre-emptive muting. Punctuation may prove surprisingly significant within/ to a new grammar of artists’ film-making. Along the way, recourse will be had to recent videos by Laure Prouvost, Patrick Staff and Christopher Kulendran Thomas and, too, to the relation between TED-talks and cheap ads. This presentation heralds the incipience of a new form of non-audible address to the reader-viewer-listener’s internal non-hearing system