Lecture performance / « The girl who never was »
Bâtiment D – James Fazy / 16h /
Une proposition de l’option Construction, avec Erik Bünger /
In 2008 an American researcher rediscovers the lost traces of the first recorded voice ever: the 148-year-old voice of a little girl singing a French lullaby. One year later another researcher reveals that what the fragment actually contains is the voice of a man. This story becomes the starting point for an exploration into the contradictory nature of the human voice and the power of the human voice to defy any conventional categories of truth and falsity, past and present, man and woman. The more we try to shut her voice out the more persistent her song becomes.
Erik Bünger is an artist, writer and composer whose work grapples with philosophical questions regarding the human voice and its paradoxical relationship to language, music and technology. His lecture performances have been presented around the world in venues such as Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Wellcome Collection in London, The Lincoln Center in New York, KW in Berlin and The Curitiba Biennial in Brazil. In 2018, his debut book, The Elephant Who Was a Rhinoceros was published on RpB Verlag (Cologne).