Hearing a possible world in the crackling of dry leaves

Performance at Coventry Biennale, Talking about the Anthropocene

A collaborative work by Lisa Hall and Salomé Voegelin

This performance is at once a talk, a documentation of a work and an auto-ethnographic journey through the field of an embodied recording practice. It combines sound files, texts, transcripts and words to retrace, comment on and further narrate ‘And it Tastes like Hair’, a work produced collaboratively by the performers for the exhibition Translating Ambience, curated by Jordan Lacey for the Yarra Sculpture Gallery. The work, a sound and text installation of 6 mono headphone channels, a stereo speaker set up, timber boards, and lettra set words, emphasises nature and human in their performance of matter together. It plays in a space that it half builds, half dismantles, where they meet as textures and surfaces, hairy, jagged, wilful and intractable, and where they breach a dualistic world view in the encounter of small hairs, skin, stems and spikes.

This performance retraces the work’s steps and considers its construction from the sound of dry leaves crumbling; from the body recorded and overheard in the field; from a daughter’s descriptions of nature felt; with John Gough’s Meteorological Journal from 1808, kept in the archives of the Wellcome Trust that inspired its journey; and from the sound of the recording and play-back technology used.

Read more about Salomé Voegelin, Coventry Biennale, and Talking About the Anthropocene