Nothing IS, Until Uttered in a Clear Voice
Nothing Is, Until Uttered in a Clear Voice, 2010 / Film, 46 seconds looped with sound recording
Nothing Is, Until Uttered in a Clear Voice is a video book in progress. Text & image focus on the voice as signifiers of identity and our collective need for memory to be announced and declared, or otherwise, lost. With this in mind I made this short film showing a camera going down my throat, as it displays my vocal chords as I am voicing. It is accompanied by a half hour sound recording of the sounds of vocal apraxia therapy exercises (recorded with singer & voice therapist, A. Hembree).
This film has been shown two times previously in 2010, along with postings I made for these exhibitions: in the At Home Gallery, it was projected into the ark of a converted synagogue (left behind by the annihilated Jewish population) in Samorin, Slovakia; then, I showed the film again at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, as part of a posting installation during the exhibition, You Are Here --The Psychogeography of the City, at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, NYC, curated by Kitty Harmon.
Additional Thoughts:
Publisher and writer, Laszlo Szigeti, wrote an article about the installation in the At Home Gallery:
“Silverberg’s street postings are also about inexplicable fears, desperations and self-consolations. …(her) rip off tabs encourage communication, announcing one’s presence. She intends a colloquy with us, thus admitting the viewer not only into the intimate space of creation … but also into the intimate spaces and moments of the soul. Which is made drastic — or even more human, more deeply authentic — by the concrete pain, the space of a concrete disease that invokes understanding via the open (larynx) throbbing in the video installation, while the mimicked sounds of therapy suck the viewer into depths of empathy where only Simone Weil had been capable of enticing us until now. Or, put more precisely, a person finds out only after penetrating to the center of the labyrinth what dreadful stations must be passed in order to achieve the ability to recognize and cultivate beauty.”