The notion of sonic publicness that I’m exploring finds a point of reference in the work of artist Ricarda Denzer. While mostly using a diversity of media, Denzer’s practice often circles in and around the question of the voice. In particular, the voice that speaks around us, or within us, is a focal point for Denzer; yet she is also concerned with how the voice may elude us — voice, in other words, is defined not only as a communicative operation, but also as an event of distraction and displacement. The elusiveness or “unavailability” of the voice becomes a starting point, and in particular, how this comes to tense the body as it tries to show itself, as it attempts to participate within the flows of sociality. The voice, in this regard, is understood as a material stretched between thinking and speaking, conversing and acting; It is less a communicative event, and more a process of negotiation.

For Denzer, the voice overwhelms.

lt is precisely this multiplicity that interests me, and which I highlight so as to draw out an understanding of global relations as one fully flushed by the over-there and the overheard. Might acoustic spatiality, as that production of a more than one — a spatiality held between manifestation and evocation, of the near and the far — offer a path toward new public configurations? To forge a sense of “community” within the radically mobile, and ever departing, life of global relations? Can we follow sonority as the primary resonance that sets me apart, while always already weaving me into greater relations? The production of an event of radical sharing?

I want to turn to the work of Édouard Glissant, and his notion of a “poetics of relation,” which may enable a fuller perspective onto this question of sharing and community. Glissant’s theory of relation is developed through a question of colonialism and its effects onto language. Working within the context of the Caribbean, Glissant strives to overcome how we might understand the colonial question by specifically seeing in language a social arena. Foreign words, in delivering the power dynamics of a colonial ideology and history, perform an interruption onto the colonised: indigenous languages are arrested and suffused with the powers of imperial force. For Glissant, such a capture though produces surprising effects or opportunities for appropriation; by passing in and through the cultures of the colonised, such languages are inevitably contorted, brought under pressure by tactics that seek out resistance or navigation in and around foreign power. In other words, language is reshaped by acts of appropriation, usage, and integration within the ever-shifting and unsteady relations of the colonial project. Glissant terms such a process “creolization.” Referring to the specific Creole languages of the Caribbean, which are contortions of the French language, Glissant applies this to a broader question, supporting an understanding of language as one of global relation.

Central to Glissant’s poetics is a refutation of language as a barrier to the proliferation of relationships, which following the migrancies and economies of modernity incite numerous border crossings. As he states, “[t]he defence of languages assuring Diversity is thus inseparable from restabilizing relations among communities.”³ In this regard, Glissant’s project moves far beyond a question of language only; the poetics of relation aims for a certain worldview, expounding a theory of global relations by which to negotiate the inherent tensions to any colonial project (as an imagined singularity). Creolization spirits a mode of resistance by specifically embracing the hybridizations of form, and in particular, the power of migration: through the itinerant movements of global relations, culture gains in its ability to create powerful forms of dialogue, sharing, echoes — an echo-monde as Glissant states, which may expand Nancy’s resonance to questions of national borders and post-colonial bodies.

I’m interested in Glissant’s theories and how they may shape an understanding of the relational as not only about face-to-face conversation, or about the deliberations of public forums. In effect, Glissant sets the scene for a global model in which encounter and exchange occur within the gaps and upon the edges of formal relations; culture moves specifically through a transient behaviour, appearing here, disappearing there, mutating and ending, embedding identities and communities within the force of becoming — within voices that might slur and err, capsize into silence or flood the scene with hyperbole. Ricarda Denzer’s notebooks appear as maps of migratory events, and in doing so, they capture and literally notate the movements of voices, of sounds, and how they participate within a temporal flow of great intensity: she provides us with a sounding art performed on the page, of a deep listening that is equally diffuse, distracted, multiple. Such are the lessons: of acoustical expressions, tuning us to the far and the near, equally.

This essay is take from the full essay by Brandon LaBelle, published in “Ricarda Denzer – ganz ohr / all ears” (De Gruyter, 2024), and originally published in: Brandon LaBelle, “Restless Acoustics, Emergent Public,” in: Marcel Cobussen/Vincent Meelberg/Barry Truax (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art (London: Routledge 2017), 279–281.

Bio

Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, such as the Listening Biennial (2021–), Communities in Movement (2019–), The Living School (2014–16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017) and the Imaginary Republic (2014–19). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, a publishing house based in Berlin. His publications include Acoustic Justice, The Other Citizen, Sonic Agency, Lexicon of the Mouth, Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian, among others.