Untuning
2024 - Bermondsey Project Space Gallery, London
Skaped - Decolonising the body exhibition


Untuning is an experimental vocal performance and sound installation that explores my ongoing, precarious process of decolonising the voice. The work interrogates the colonial legacies embedded in Western musical epistemologies sunch as pitch hierarchy, noise suppression, disembodied virtuosity, and reclaims subaltern vocalities through childlike experimentation with unorganised sounds and ‘noises’.

Summary_In Untuning, I explore my own process of destabilisation of binary categorisations of musicality (e.g, music/noise, in tune/out of tune, body/mind, human/nature) to meet the human voice in its in-betweenness and contradiction. By resituating the voice within my own body and ancestral land, I reconnect with timbres, dialects, and affective resonances of Southern Italian oral traditions, reclaiming homeplace as a site of epistemic resistance. The sound installation features layered vocal experimentations within ‘non-musical’ sonorities, amplified and spatialised across the gallery. The performance unfolds as a ritual of unlearning: I play with my voice as a child would, allowing my voice to resonate and dissonate into new territories, within the framework of performance as research.
This practice engages decolonial sound studies and feminist phenomenology, where voice is not a neutral instrument but a contested terrain of identity, power, and belonging (Stoever, 2016; Eidsheim, 2019). It stems from reflections on how colonial auditory regimes have disciplined the body into conformity, and proposes decolonisation as an embodied, sonic refusal. By experimenting with contradiction against expectation, I explore the co-existence of multiple, at times irreconcilable, identities.

Methodology_ Autoethnographic performance; vocal experimentation.

References
Eidsheim, N. (2019). The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. Duke University Press.
Feld, S. (2015). Acoustemology. In D. Novak & M. Sakakeeny (Eds.), Keywords in Sound (pp. 12–21). Duke University Press.
Ochoa Gautier, A. M. (2014). Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Duke University Press.
Stoever, J. L. (2016). The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. NYU Press.