A Sound Identity: Neither Voice Noir Class

ICA Curator Carey Robinson and theorist Tristam Adams draw from their respective research interests in human voice to examine how, even in a time of unsettled identities, race and class are produced, constructed and categorised in the ear of the listener.

 

In Neither Voice Noir Class, we analyse concepts of voice as mutable and immaterial, to uncover how the prism of mutability and immateriality may bring us closer to new ways of thinking about identity. Social constructs bleed into how voice is ‘heard’; we might hear it claimed that a person ‘sounded black’, ‘sounded like a woman’, or ‘sounded posh’. These assumptions expose how identities are frequently assumed to be identifiable in voice. But where do such statements come from? How do social constructs become, supposedly, audible in the voice of the other?

 

Neither Voice Noir Class invites you to use the *scratch model to uncover the problematic relationships between voice, race and class, by questioning voice in popular culture through examples from music, film and media.

 

A Sound Identity is a day celebrating the ways women, race and sound intersect to resist the social order. This programming is part of In formation III, a discursive platform emphasising collective production and learning, and forms of sociality. This expansive series of presentations, workshops, performances and participatory events is collaboratively organised by the ICA curatorial team and staff members.

 

Carey Robinson is the ICA’s Curator, Education Programme.

 

Tristam Adams is a theorist, writer and PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. His first book, The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organises Empathy was published by Repeater Books in 2016.

Other events forming part of A Sound Identity:

 

5pm: Haul & Pull Up

8pm: YaYa Bones

8:30pm: Mina Rose

9pm: Nzinga Soundz