The instruction is to tell someone | Jana Vigor

Jana Vigor holds an MA from the joint Communication and Culture program between X University and York University. Her creative practice is grounded in methods of listening and attention to sonics and embodied relationship with sound, others, and environments. Her scholarly interests engage and build on her foundational artistic practices with sound and voice and professional knowledges from working in anti-violence, mental health, and gender-justice. 

Since its emergence, the #metoo movement has elicited countless narratives. People with experiences of gender-based violence are encouraged to perform their stories for the public or realms of networked publics or counterpublics. The research-creation project ‘the instruction is to tell someone’ is a collaborative investigation into the process of disclosure and how telling a story of violence varies across time and setting, impacting the formation of subjectivity and cultural positions of victim or survivor. The project is a silent moving-image of the spectrographic data of two voices in dialogue. The artwork displays only visual sonic information like rhythm, timbre, pitch, and harmonics, as well as the space of silence and listening while the narrative content is muted. The piece’s silence enacts a melancholic resistance to the prevalence of survivor narratives that uphold neoliberal ideals of personal expression and effort as avenues for healing and wholeness. It also attends to the importance of dynamic dialogue and to the necessity of an engaged listening partner to a person’s telling. The installation runs for the entire 2 hours and 7 minutes of the recorded dialogue.

Biography

Jana Vigor holds an MA from the joint Communication and Culture program between X University and York University. Her creative practice is grounded in methods of listening and attention to sonics and embodied relationship with sound, others, and environments. Her scholarly interests engage and build on her foundational artistic practices with sound and voice and professional knowledges from working in anti-violence, mental health, and gender-justice. 

Artist Statement

Since its emergence, the #metoo movement has elicited countless narratives. People with experiences of gender-based violence are encouraged to perform their stories for the public or realms of networked publics or counterpublics. The research-creation project ‘the instruction is to tell someone’ is a collaborative investigation into the process of disclosure and how telling a story of violence varies across time and setting, impacting the formation of subjectivity and cultural positions of victim or survivor. The project is a silent moving-image of the spectrographic data of two voices in dialogue. The artwork displays only visual sonic information like rhythm, timbre, pitch, and harmonics, as well as the space of silence and listening while the narrative content is muted. The piece’s silence enacts a melancholic resistance to the prevalence of survivor narratives that uphold neoliberal ideals of personal expression and effort as avenues for healing and wholeness. It also attends to the importance of dynamic dialogue and to the necessity of an engaged listening partner to a person’s telling. The installation runs for the entire 2 hours and 7 minutes of the recorded dialogue.