NUP 2020 newspaper
VOICE AND SOMETHING MORE attempts to grasp voice: to work with voice, to recognise voice; to use voice; to listen to and interfere with voice; to fight for a voice; to agree, argue and sing along with voice, make bodies move and fall asleep to voice.
Anne Carson writes in her essay “The Gender of Sound”, “It is in large part according to the sounds people make that we judge them sane or insane, male or female, good, evil, trustworthy, depressive, marriageable, moribund, likely or unlikely to make war on us, little better than animals, inspired by God.” To understand all the meanings of the voice, the voice must be witnessed as an event, something that revolves around bodies, an entity in its own right inherent to the body and to language.
Yet, the voice belongs to neither. It operates autonomously – it sounds, gestures, exposes, hides, worries, calms, irritates, creates, damages and makes us laugh. It resonates, it hypnotises, it syncs, it has its sonorities – its silences, its rhythms and its intonations. Whatever it does, however it moves, the voice rarely goes unnoticed. The voice does not move away from the body. It expands it, carries it forwards, trying to connect it with the outside world.
As the body is bound to its poetics and politics, its accents and dialectics, its grammar with its errors, so is voice. Language lingers in the mouth, slips out to chat a little, has its vocabulary on tip of the tongue, repeats and corrects itself… What is hidden by language, body utters. Through the voice, be it vocal or silent, we make ourselves heard, be it in the landscape, in the room, in society or in politics. It is through voice that private becomes public.
This year, the festival programme combines a polyphony of artistic expressions and statements. It gives the stage to unfolding the emotional, social and political potentials of voice. It features poetry, the making of rhythm, synthetic sounds, inscribed narratives and historical contexts, humour, agency, participatory and collective voice, silence and, as the title suggests, something more. The juxtaposition of these different positions illustrates and challenges how dominant narratives, gender constructs, and the ruling political rhetoric can be questioned through the performativity of voice. Artists from a wide variety of backgrounds explore and redefine contemporary speech acts, work through vocal and linguistic boundaries, shift meanings and identities.
While most of the festival’s performances and concerts take place at Kanuti Gildi SAAL, Sveta Bar and the venue at Sakala 3, the programme is accompanied by a series of shows on IDA radio. The NUPP (button in Estonian) programme offers a complementary insight, including introductions and follow-ups to the practices of festival’s participants. The medium of radio transfers voice and sound from one place to another and therefore makes it possible to play with all kinds of relationships: live and recorded, present and absent, living and dead, as well as with the ones who are listening and the ones who are not.
Combining newly commissioned and existing performances, readings, modular synthesiser compositions, process-based collaborations as well as concerts, the festival’s focus tunes in to these technical, conceptual yet coincidental relations of voice.
To insist upon variety, the programme is divided into different chapters that show the way while getting lost in VOICE AND SOMETHING MORE.
Egija Inzule, Margit Säde
Margit Säde is an independent curator and art worker based in Tallinn and Zurich. Switching between the roles of curator, educator, producer and artist, her main topics of interest are subjectivity, precarity and collectivity as well as language, human psyche and voice. In her work she emphasises the self-organised, the collaborative and ongoing nature of art practice. From 2017 to 2020 she worked as a head of Contemporary Art Master Programme and visiting associate professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Egija Inzule is curator and current director of NAC of Vilnius Academy of Arts in Nida, Lithuania. In order to respond to the hybrid character of NAC that includes running a residency programme, organising an international doctoral school, curating the arts programme, hosting students’ seminars and managing the general premises of NAC, Inzule works on developing processes and initiate productions that emerge from historical, geopolitical and sociopolitical analysis and reflection on the location with focus on significance and agency of the place.
There she co-founded the research/residency programme Neringa Forest Architecture, a transdisciplinary project focussing on spatial and material processes, forestry and policy-making to analyze the broader scope of forest-as-infrastructure in the Nordic-Baltic region.
Friday 13.11, Kanuti Gildi SAAL
Voice Finding its Body
18:30
Eglė Budvytytė (Amsterdam-Vilnius) "Incantation Karaoke"
(group 1)
19:30
Egija Inzule (Riia-Zürich) & Margit Säde (Tallinn-Zurich)
Gerry Bibby (Berlin) "Throwing Voice (Borrowed Time)"
Jelena Glazova (Riga) "Greed”
Eglė Budvytytė (Amsterdam-Vilnius) "Incantation Karaoke"
(group 2)
Friday 13.11, Sveta Baar
Voice of Shared Beginnings
21:00 Doors
Nancy Nakamura Räpipunt: liina pääsuke (Väätsa-Viin), IRMELI (Tallinn), MAAKAS (Väätsa), Ookean (Väätsa-Tallinn)
Yasmyn (Tallinn) "Guilty-Not-Guilty Pleasures”
Saturday 14.11, Kanuti Gildi SAAL
Voice of Dissolving in Rhythm
21:30
Michele Rizzo (Amsterdam) "Higher”
19:30
Erik Bünger (Berlin) "The Girl That Never Was"
19:30
Sveta Grigorjeva (Tallinn) “TEKHNE”
19:30
Hiwa K (Sulaymaniyah-Berlin) “Chicago Boys: while we were singing they were dreaming...” / Nida edition of the neo-liberalism research group told by Egija Inzule (Riga-Zurich) and Vika Matuzaitė (Vilnius) with inserts by the amateur choir Smiltatė (Nida) (Free entrance)
19:30
Ana Mendes (London-Stockholm) "Self-portrait”
Lina Lapelyte (Vilnius) "The Best of: (ongoing)”
19:00 Doors
Lolina (London)
Serious Serious Showreel by Michaela Kisling, Till Megerle, Artjom Astrov (Viin-Berliin-Tallinn)
Practice Room with Court Rat, arxcharlaide & baribari mai, Marta & Edgar Vunsh, Ganna Bogomol jt.
19:30
Queer womxn DJ collective (Vilnius)
MajorDanger (Tallinn)
James Lórien MacDonald (Helsingi) "I Got Online and Went Mad"
Querelle (Kaunas)
Saturday 21.11, Sveta Bar
Voice of Community
14:00 – 17:00 Workshop for upcoming and practicing she* DJs by Queer womxn DJ collective (Vilnius)
Free entrance, with pre-registration
19:30
Doris Hallmägi (Tallinn) "How They Used to"
Nicolas Buzzi (Zürich) "Us"
Darkside (Tartu)
Nina Elektrichka (Riga)
19:30
Hanna-Liisa Lavonen, Jaanika Arum, Helen Västrik, Katrin Enni, Helle Ly Tomberg, Ellen Vene, Andre Joosep Arming, Kleer Keret Tali (Tallinn) “Värelev siinus”
NUPP at IDA radio idaidaida.net
13.11 / 15:00 NUPP: Voice of Shared Beginnings (Margit Säde & Egija Inzule, liina pääsuke)
16.11 / 17:00 NUPP: Voice of Dissolving in Rhythm (Margit Säde & Egija Inzule, Michele Rizzo)
17.11 / 14:00 NUPP: Voice over Centuries (Egija Inzule & Vika Matuzaitė, Hiwa K)
18.11 / 16:00 NUPP: Voice of Echoes and Yeah (Artjom Astrov, Lolina & külalised)
19.11 / 15:00 NUPP: Voice of Queer Feminist Fun (James MacDonald, Querelle, Aet Kuusik)
20.11 / 13:00 NUPP: Voice of Synthetic Polyphony (Nicolas Buzzi & Doris Hallmägi)
Curators: Margit Säde, Egija Inzule
Producer: Uue Performantsi Selts
Co-Producer: Kanuti Gildi SAAL
Visual identity: Jaan Evart, Moonika Maidre
Festival initiators: Anders Härm, Priit Raud
Supporters and partners:
Eesti Kultuurkapital, Tallinna Kultuuriamet, Rootsi Suursaatkond Tallinnas, Feministeerium, IDA raadio, Nida Art Colony, SAALstuudio, Sakala 3, Serious Serious, Sveta Baar, NAC of Vilnius Academy of Arts jt.
All programs subject to change.