FULLY BOOKED · workshop with Anna Holveck, October 2023

Image : Anna Holveck.

As part of the exhi­bi­tion "Un·Tuning Together. Practicing lis­tening with Pauline Oliveros" at Bétonsalon, artist Anna Holveck invites people to par­tic­i­pate to a col­lec­tive vocal expe­ri­ence in a work­shop cul­mi­nating in a public per­for­mance. Between warm-ups, sound impro­vi­sa­tions, acoustic games, read­ings, dis­cus­sions and pro­jec­tions, this work­shop will give the group of around fif­teen par­tic­i­pants time to build a shared quality of lis­tening. All these col­lec­tive exper­i­ments will feed into the com­po­si­tion of the score and frame­work for the new per­for­mance.

The per­for­mance will be built around the idea of an acous­matic voice, "whose source one cannot see, a voice whose origin cannot be iden­ti­fied, a voice one cannot place” (Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 2006). With the group, the path of exper­i­men­ta­tion will start with a simple ges­ture derived from yawning, that of mod­estly cov­ering the mouth with the hand. In child­hood, the neu­ro­log­ical sen­si­tivity of the hand and mouth develop simul­ta­ne­ously and are asso­ci­ated with the dis­covery of the world. The mobility of the hand and the activity of the mouth temper each other.

In the work­shop, the hand, which is at once a tool, a mask and an acoustic panel, will be used to con­ceal the source of the voice, to shape its sonori­ties and to blur its spa­tial origin.
Anna Holveck would like to take these exper­i­ments towards a col­lec­tive per­for­mance that will grad­u­ally inte­grate the voices of mem­bers of the audi­ence. As if after a yawn, hidden behind their hands and com­plicit in the unfolding of the per­for­mance, the per­formers will accom­pany the audi­ence in a col­lec­tive impro­vi­sa­tion using the vocal frame­work resulting from the work­shop research. In this dis­creet way, all the bodies pre­sent (per­formers and audi­ence) will be able to vocalize or listen to the diver­sity of floating voices, from the inti­macy of the palm of their hand.

The work­shop [FULLY BOOKED]
will be held at Bétonsalon over 6 ses­sions of 3 hours:
Wednesday 11 to Friday 13 October, 7.30pm to 10pm
and Wednesday 18 to Friday 20 October, 7.30pm to 10pm

The per­for­mance, Palm mask
will take place on Saturday 21 October at Bétonsalon, between 5pm and 7pm.
Participants are asked to commit to attend all ses­sions.
No pre­vious vocal expe­ri­ence is nec­es­sary.

BIOGRAPHIES
Clara Schulmann, author, researcher and art critic, will accom­pany this work­shop with a basket of the­o­ret­ical and sen­si­tive tools avail­able to the group, to help and nourish the pro­cess of cre­ation, sharing and writing. This basket will be sent to any par­tic­i­pants who wish to famil­iarize them­selves with its con­tents before the work­shop. The basket will con­tinue to be filled with the var­ious expe­ri­ences of the group throughout the work­shop. With Anna Holveck, Clara Schulmann and inter­ested par­tic­i­pants, this stage around the basket will be shared with the public on Saturday 14 October at Bétonsalon, from 4pm.

Anna Holveck was born in 1993 and lives and works in Paris. As a visual artist, she uses per­for­mance, video and sound instal­la­tion to explore the rela­tion­ship between sound and voice pro­duc­tion devices and space. Sometimes singing, some­times sound engi­neer or sounding board, in her work the body lis­tens to, trans­lates or mimes the vibra­tions of the acoustic and polit­ical land­scape in which it is embedded. Anna Holveck con­structs immer­sive lis­tening sit­u­a­tions that involve both the person pro­ducing the sound and the person per­ceiving it, standing on a blurred boundary between ear and mouth. His work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, FR), the Fondation Pernod Ricard (Paris, FR), the Creux de l’Enfer (Thiers, FR), the Vitrine et les Réserves of the Frac Ile-de-France (Paris and Romainville, FR), the IAC – Institut d’art con­tem­po­rain – Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes (FR), the Actoral - International Festival of Arts & Contemporary Writings (Marseille, FR) and the Instants Chavirés (Montreuil, FR). Several of his works joined the public col­lec­tions of the Frac Ile-de-France in 2021 and the Frac Franche-Comté (Besançon, FR) in 2017. Her latest piece, pro­duced in the base­ment of the IRCAM (Paris, FR), can cur­rently be seen at the Musée d’art de Joliette (QC) as part of the group exhi­bi­tion “Dis­solving your ear plugs”. She will be in res­i­dence at Privas at the invi­ta­tion of the IAC (FR), to make a film sup­ported by the Fondation des Artistes and the Center National des Arts Plastiques and then at a long-term res­i­dence with the art center Le Lait (Albie, FR) in part­ner­ship with the isdaT – supe­rior insitut of art and design of Toulouse (FR).