5–7 July 2019, Off-site
This event consists of workshops and a performance to create a participatory, improvised cross species choir. It is a speculative attempt at considering language across species in the urban context, specifically between people and common wild birds.
Listening walks will form the core component of the event, where participants will be invited to walk and listen to the birds and to speculate on communication and language and how it might manifest across species. Each workshop will begin with a listening walk followed by an informal presentation about our relationship with other animals, specifically birds, via sound. This will include short readings from writers such as Donna Haraway, Val Plumwood, Deborah Bird Rose and Salomé Voegelin, discussion about animal language and voicing practice.
The participatory performance will take place at the site of one of the listening walks where the sounds of the birds are clearly audible. Improvisatory in nature, the performance will also include compositional prompts where necessary.
This event is presented in association with Helen Frosi (SoundFjord), and EnCOUnTErs, a multiarts project at the nexus of art, ecology and the sonic imagination).
Music and Other Living Creatures is a series at Cafe OTO (curated by OTO Projects) dedicated to music about, with, or by other living creatures. Birds, tigers, chickens, insects and many other living creatures are explored through sound-walks, listening sessions, commissioned performances, live responses and discussions.
Catherine Clover’s multidisciplinary practice addresses communication through voice, language and the interplay between hearing/listening, seeing/reading. Using field recording, digital imaging and the spoken/written word she explores an expanded approach to language within and across species through a framework of everyday experience, including the use of extant material and found footage. With listening as a key focus and the complexity of the urban as a shared sonic space, the artworks prompt transmission and reception through the fluidity, instability and mobility of voicing and languaging. The artworks are social in nature and frequently involve collaboration with other artists and with audiences. Their forms include public artworks, soundwalks, performance, readings, texts/scores, sound, installation, imaging.
Her artworks have been presented at Soundpocket, Hong Kong; Harvestworks, New York; Café Oto, London; Liquid Architecture, Melbourne; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; The Substation, Melbourne; Kaunas Artist’s House, Lithuania; Ting Shuo, Taiwan; CRISAP University of the Arts, London; University of the Arts, Tokyo; RMIT Gallery, Melbourne; McClelland Gallery, Melbourne; Texas Tech University, US; Massey University, Wellington, NZ; SoundFjord, London; Emerson Galerie, Berlin; London Metropolitan University; Red Gate Gallery, Beijing.
Clover lives between London, UK, where she was brought up, and Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation. She teaches in Naarm/Melbourne at Swinburne University (MA Writing), RMIT University (MA Public Art) and holds a practice led PhD (Fine Art) through RMIT University.
