Erase

To erase implies a misstep or mistake, but perhaps it’s more about being seen, rubbed raw, smoothed over.

Garrett TiedemannUnder the Skin

Erasure is violence. Ever, always, being justified: “The director said she made the changes so as ‘not [to] show them.'”

Sun Yung Shin is the voice in the piece. She is a writer and educator living in Minneapolis where she co-directs the community organization Poetry Asylum with poet Su Hwang. When The Beguiled was released in 2017, she was part of a conversation about the whitewashing of its narrative and the violence of erasure that is justified everyday.

The 1966 novel had a black female slave as a supporting character, whom director Sofia Coppola removed from the film; and for a biracial character from the novel, she cast white actress Kirsten Dunst.


Annette Le FortPhonetic Skin: A Library of Voices

The paper speaks. The artist/typographer sets up a table and lays out the materials for an experiment: two hands hold various books; they open them and then, during an imaginary process of reading, rub two pages together. Listen for their phonetic quality.

The human voice carries within it traces of the body that produces it and these also “speak”; so too the different book-bodies develop voices which are influenced by their respective materiality, paper, binding.

The sound of 38 books are presented as an acoustical archive. The work deals with the process of reading and in doing so poetically interlinks the bodies of voice and writing as they traverse memory and a synaesthesia of writing and sound.

Featured here are two of those ‘book-voices’ — Franz Kafka and Gertrude Stein.


Adern X (Andrea Piran) – From Canvas to Painting

The track revolves around the idea of cleaning as a form of erasure. To smooth something implies to rub until at least a layer of unwanted matter is erased. This could sonically be seen as playing a guitar using rod or similar things as a part of it has to be moved to obtain a note or tune a radio as this is a form of removing the background noise.

Sound is seen as what it remains when noise is erased, or the idea of tuning as something is closely related to removing a piece of noise but not everything, only the part that covers sound.


Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell + Hannah White) – Furrow

Field recordings from a walk on the snow and ice along part of the Ridgeway, Britain’s oldest road. The voice comes from underneath, heard but not fully, sounding a poem from just below the surface.

Tenderly undulating
Accentuating slopes and scruffs of sodden life,
Waiting beneath cotton clumped tufts.
Sheepskin bodies weighing furrowed clods
Numbing fingers and ears in sweet wet softness.
From under warm membranes
Electric threads spin out.
Lines of force make fast
Perceptible under fading light.


Joan SchumanThin as Skin
An itchy, destructive and finally proud relationship to one’s skin. Features the voice of a young woman exploring her tattoos, her early destructive experiences with her skin, and the legacy of otherness upon the surface of her body.

This was part of a longer series considering stories around skin, produced about 20 years ago.


CRADLE
[Ernestus Chald |
Gabi Schaffner |
Jamie Flett + Judith Williams |
La Cosa Preziosa |
Stephen Bradley]

LISTEN

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