Diane Mahín
Sustain a cry and witness it infiltrating. Hold it long enough until it fractures and shoots into space. Adjust your hand. Sustain a cry until you are not in one piece anymore, until your unknowingness lays bare. You are not fully known to yourself, because part of what you are is the enigmatic traces of others. Reposition. Consider standing up. Sustain a cry and endure its unbearability. You are vulnerable and therefore wounded. Your fate is not originally or finally separable from mine.
large space in the back of the mouth shares a dissection of vocalized crying as a sonic phenomenon. Crying, as a symptom of grief, pushes the bodily state of the crier to operate beyond control. In this sense, crying is ungraspable and exposes the crier to a state foreign to themselves. This state of unknowingness, as called by Judith Butler, reveals how humans are tied to each other. The sonic composition of cries is carried by, but detached from the individual performers in order to give space for the audience to engage with this state of unknowingness. Staying with grief allows a return to a sense of human vulnerability, to the collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another.
this text contains quotes and paraphrasing from Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
credits
concept, composition, direction Diane Mahín
co-creation and performance Unnur Birna J. Backman, Virág Anna Virág, Luz Bran
costume design Miruna Vlad
artistic advice Isadora Tomasi
compositional advice Jan Kees van Kampen, Hildur Elísa Jónsdóttir, Márton Menyhért
notation Virág Anna Virág, Diane Mahín
with thanks to Sjaron Minailo, Flavia Dzodan, Claron McFadden, Ari Teperberg, Meia Oei, Manuel Groothuysen, Parvaneh Moazzeni, Henrica van den Berg, Medialab, Sandberg Instituut