The following dialogue — between artists Thembi Soddell, Tina Stefanou, Xen Nhà, and A Hanley, and curator Joel Stern — took place across WhatsApp, Zoom, and Google Docs in November 2020. The purpose was to explore and develop common threads in each artist’s practice, which might inform the preparation for the as-of-the-time-unrealised contributions to Liquid Architecture’s program at McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery as part of the exhibition Site & Sound. As such, this text has a provisional, speculative quality, serving as an introduction of the artists to one another, and the reader, as well as an articulation of possible directions for the work to come. By the time this text is published and circulated, the commissioned audio pieces will have also been realised. In that sense, we are writing for future readers, including ourselves, with a more complete understanding of what we mean to say.
The song ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’ is playing on the radio in the back of the room — it begins to distort.
(Tina Stefanou)
There is an opportunity to explore the implications of the ‘heard’, the relationship of sound to the listener, and the sonic agencies that point to ‘something’ beyond human perception. For me, ‘the self’ is a multiplicity (the phrase ‘ecologies of selves’ tickles her right ear), there is social and artistic value in giving voice to these multiple states.
(Thembi Soddell)
I often think about how people’s personalities are known to just be a mix of the five or six people we spend the most time with.
A round of applause echoes from the local stadium.
(Tina Stefanou)
(laughs) This makes me think how my chooks and doggy are the five ‘persons’ I have spent the most time with these past months and what that means for my human relations. Moving beyond human exceptionalism, there is a subjectivity of relational interdependence with other-than-humans. I think in terms of more-than-human subjectivity, where the isolating weight of humanism is transformed, ‘feeling into’ those interdependencies — the polyphonic self is always more-than-one, always a process-on-its way, always being-with-others — regardless of what you make.
Tina begins moving her head, mimicking one of her chooks and growling in a canine-like fashion — Thembi joins her.