Laetitia Kozlova

EXHIBITING THE SOUND OF THE INTIMATE

My proposal is based on the sound installation that I created for the MUṬIKKAPPAṬĀTA exhibition (Nov. 2024–Jan. 2025) at RAW Material Company, centre for art, knowledge and society, as part of the Dakar Biennale. The exhibition is a journey into the intimate, multiple and colonisation-marked territories of Nathalie Vairac (*1972). The Senegal-based performer with an international career was born in France to an Indian mother and a Guadeloupean father. Back in her homelands, she feels the ancestral pain, she questions the visible and invisible legacies, and seeks how to re-fertilise the places still gaping from her ferments. She writes and records.

Nathalie Vairac entrusted me with her recorded voice. I heard in it her breath of life to transcend violence, and her desire to be. Based on this gesture, I sought to find a way to give form to the act of listening to these sounds, defying the technical, acoustic and curatorial conditions of the exhibition space, while allowing for freedom of listening and interpretation.

I will share the reflective and creative process that led to the proposal of four listening spaces/times. This includes a discussion on what it means to capture sound, on the conditions of our listening, non-linear and operating in the ‘tactile sphere’ (Deshays, 2023, p. 139), on sharing in space, in dialogue with the rest of the visual and sensory narratives. I will insist on the delicacy required to handle this living, sonic space, and listening as the main method.

My contribution will take the form of a spoken, embodied performance in a subdued atmosphere to emphasise the movements of the sound of the voice, without being encumbered by vision. Situated at the intersection of Sound Studies and Cultural Heritage Studies, it addresses the central question of identity and the transmission of intimate trajectories in relation to history.

Laetitia Kozlova is the founder of Sound Memories (MÉMOIRES SONORES), a production structure which defends the writing of sound, and poses the voice as a living, sensitive, collective memory. MÉMOIRES SONORES defends listening as an engagement. MÉMOIRES SONORES creates listening situations inside and outside the museum. Laetitia Kozlova is a doctoral candidate in Universidade Católica Portuguesa, School of Arts, Research Center for Science and Technology of the Arts. She is interested in new listening practices of recorded spoken voice, at the intersection of Sound Studies, Performing Arts and Cultural Heritage Sciences. Her research project is supported by the Portuguese national agency FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia). It unfolds on two continents, Europe and Africa.