her harsh, high and deep voice: a polyphony

Lara Dâmaso is interested in the potential of the female* voice when used in an irrational, dissonant and uncontrolled way. The physical quality of the vocal apparatus becomes evident and palpable in her performances. Against the background of Anne Carson’s theories in The Gender of Sound, her practice is also intended as an intervention against patriarchal structures in which the female* voice continues to be conditioned to politeness and harmony, and its expressive revolutionary potential is suppressed. Amplified by four loudspeakers, her performance her harsh, high and deep voice: a polyphony transcends the normalised use of voice and fills the physical and emotional resonance space with vibrations caused by the interplay of voice and body movements. Lara Dâmaso records her voice live and edits it in a sound spectrum ranging from intimate tenderness to almost unbearable brutality. The superimposition creates a dissonant, free composition that permeates Otto Wagner’s Art Nouveau architecture of Alte Postsparkasse. Not only the singing and the dancing body become one, seeing and hearing also merge with each other in the abstract landscape of sound, in which vulnerability, hope and agency are renegotiated.