2024
Sound installation
Ceramic, earth, 4 channel sound pieces
*It was intended to be experienced in a multichannel format. The version presented here combines all channels into a single track for documentation purposes.
After moving to Germany, I found myself surrounded by tones and rhythms of languages I did not understand. These unfamiliar utterances reached me first as sound rather than meaning, and I began to follow them with my voice - humming, tracing, and repeating them.
As I roll these once-linguistic sounds inside my mouth, the tones gradually dissolve into my tongue and settle into shapes my body can hold.
When a sound that originated elsewhere is absorbed, reshaped, and released through my own vocal tract, I begin to wonder: whose sound/language is it now?
It exists somewhere between the foreign and the familiar, revealing a threshold where my body and this new environment start to blur into one another.
There are voids
that I can neither touch nor hear.
I’ve been losing something.
Trying to root through the memories;
picking up and gathering pieces
broken in many places and times,
those pieces become one
through the tongue
given by my mother.
I wear voices with this tongue
and
sense the message
in the voice
at the tip of my tongue.
The voices keep changing
and changing,
leaving only
fragments.
Now,
my mother’s voice and my own are different.
I only remember
the whisper of the wind that filled the voids,
the whisper that I cannot sing.