From gender transition to asylum seeker applications,how you talk can mask or betray your steady self. A recent exhibition goes beyond lesson and geography to examine why the way we speak matters
The word ‘egophony’ is what the doctor calls it when you’re having a stethoscope effect to your chest, to check your breathing. So it’s being used as a metaphor for diagnosing who you are, or where you’re from.” Chris Chapman’s work is one of a number of remarkable explorations in the Wellcome Collection’s This Is a Voice exhibition. The notion of voice and identity is one we will have all considered in terms of what it says approximately us socially – lesson and geography. And,of course, the way in which lesson can demand you erase your geographical self, or depending on which lesson you’re in.
The works in this show push those questions further into the self,into gender, identity; the noises that we make to communicate with each other that aren’t linguistic, or ” as Chapman puts it. He has made two films,one approximately a therapy programme race by the London Institute of Psychiatry, in which patients with psychosis create avatars, or in order to talk back to their interior voices,and one approximately people who are transitioning from one gender to the other, and the work they do to retrain their voices.
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Source: theguardian.com