ANTJE PRUST

SYNOPSIS

Once upon a time there were females who sang in polymorphic voices, singing and speaking about unspeakable things, they claimed their voice to reclaim femininity.
They were THE LITTLE MERMAID who wanted to transform, who wanted her place as a body of becoming, becoming human, longing of belonging to a place she could call home other than the places, her father, her family, society had defined for her. She was determined not to stay where she was supposed to stay, so she agreed - to let her tongue being cut out.

They were St. Christine who denied to worship her father and his gods. She screamed in his face and then - he cut her tongue out.

They were Philomela, who was abducted to the woods and raped. And her perpetrators - to prevent her from telling what has happenend- cut her tongue out.

CUTTING THE TONGUE, that obscene extension of the body, that fleshy abjection, that can move in and out, connecting the inside with the outside, the framed with the unframed, one body with another, THE TONGUE, that sexy intruder, that lurking excrescence, penetrating with words and sticky licking. Located between that other set of lips, in the abyss of the mouth, the black hole echoing the feminine truth. OF COURSE it had to be cut in an act of masculine paranoia, in a perverted reverse of patriarchy´s fear of castration.

Wasn’t it patriarchy who said: “A woman should be seen not heard”?
But isn’t there a bloodline of bitches who respond: “It´s my party and I cry if I want to”?

The Banshees, the Sirens, Huldra, Khana, Laila Aisha, Augustine and her hysterical bunch, Marguerite Porete, The Little Mermaid, Philomela, St. Cristine: they and their voices were labeled inappropriate, animalic, heratic, uncanny, crazy, a threat. They were mutilated, they were muted but they were not silenced.

The bloody mess of cutting tongues did not prevent them from making noise.
To be very real: Females are goddesses of gore, they know BLOOD, they are leaking of it regularly, leaving stains of unproductiveness.

Femininity cannot be silenced. 
It keeps on inventing voices, reclaiming monstrosity and tenderness. 
Reclaiming labeled as THE OTHER in actually becoming ANOTHER. 
The little mermaid choose dance to express herself, Philomela wove her story into a tapestry, and that language was perfectly understood by her sister Prokne, and St. Christine? 
She kept on telling her father to FUCK OFF. 
Were these vociferations magical acts of vaginal ventriloquism? 
The voice seems to be always acousmatic, which means deriving from a source that can not be seen or defined. It does not only belong to the physics but also to the metaphysics. Every vociferation, every emission of the voice seems to be an abjection, a plus-de-corps, a surplus of the body, a no-more-body, a bodily excess, emission and absorption, present and absent at the same time, vanishing in the moment it is summoned,

There is a kinship of the voice and female bodie_s: placed in between, at
a break, they are often referred to as something other or in a deliminating elseness. Their voices make audible what was supposed to be inaudible according to masculine logic.
They reclaim ONOMAUTONOMY.

There is no such thing as deacousmatization, but the potential of a noisy femmetopia.
Noise has ambiguous qualities. It is at the border of audibility and destroying
audibility. It refers to displacement, de(con)struction, anarchy but also to
revolution, individual practice and resistance. It touches the limit of disgust and
joy, it shatters our fictions of aesthetics and beauty.

Picking up microphones, experimenting with voice distortion and other electro-acoustic effects, tongues are cut from the body as new voices are born. The technical amplification performs huge amplified bodies. As bodies merge with technology they become cyborgs, masking and unmasking identities - they become noise avatars.

Performing as noise avatars holds a potential of inventing brute bodies, sweet bodies, fluid bodies, various bodies. 
To untie the tongues, to sing, speak, sigh, moan in tongues, to make identities AUDIBLE through female noise.

Disturbing the visible appearance of the body, it is a creation of a completely new species , an audible body, an acoustic embodiment. 
Females can hack into their bodies and wound themselves, they can rewrite and erase hypertexts. Instead of staying at the surface, or just connecting and using the interface, they really dig into the program, squatting the flesh of the virtual: experiencing their impossible bodies.

Noise avatars are the act of performing difference, heteroglossia, queerness through the use of alien voices, to compose noise as a choir of a female polyphony.