Katarina Zdjelar’s ‘The Perfect Sound’: Speaking Place
I heard a hum coming from the top floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. After ascending through three floors of Serbian and former Yugoslavian art history, passing the wood carvings of Sreten Stojanović and taking in the post cubist landscapes of Roman Petrović, I reached the highest but darkest floor of the museum. Looking to the far room, I spotted a projection of a close up shot of a mouth - its tongue, teeth and lips moving in an uneasy way. I sat down in front of the screen and it was only when I got up some minutes later to read the wall caption that I found out I had been watching a work about an immigrant following the instructions of a speech therapist in a session of ‘Accent Removal Training’ - taking place in my home city of Birmingham. The irony wasn’t lost on me, but it appears it was on whoever wrote the caption.
Katarina Zdeljar’s ‘The Perfect Sound’ (2009) is a fourteen-and-a-half-minute-long single-channel video work, comprised largely of shots of the mouths of two men. The first, the older man, is a speech coach. His grey goatee and moustache differentiate him from the second, a younger man who is his student. And our first image is of his mouth, from which we hear the hums and dings and meeeeeeeooooowwwwwssss. These sounds, as in many of Zdjelar’s video pieces, are the core thread of the work, forming an expansive and loudly played audio element which often continues without visual accompaniment. Where images do appear, Zdjelar cuts between them sharply and frequently, the unsteady camerawork evoking a feeling of vibration and movement, a metaphor for the physical nature of sound.
Zdjelar was born in Serbia, and much of her work centres on language, pronunciation, translation, and speech. ‘The Perfect Sound’ was produced in conjunction with the European Media Art Network and Vivid Projects in Birmingham. The lesson she filmed for the video was led by speech therapist Robin Wooldridge at his school of speech and voice. In a conversation with Lucy Cotton, Zdjelar explains that “‘The Perfect Sound’ looks at the phenomenon of cultural integration through the erasure of difference in pronunciation and the production of neutrality”. Indeed, the work is closely cropped and intimate, but it is about the bigger issues of immigration, integration, visibility, and opacity. While we are watching a piece without words, there is a narrative, a dialogue between two protagonists which makes ‘The Perfect Sound’ into a “social drama” as psychoanalyst and critic Mladen Dolar described the video. Yet, this is a distorted version of a typical narrative structure: the student is overcoming a struggle, going through the motions, guided by an older and learned figure, but where the end goal might typically be the achievement of distinction and greatness, here the student seeks the opposite, his quest is for ‘neutrality’, to blend in. The work asks questions of what it is to integrate into a society, of how voices are audible signatures of places. For immigrants coming to a city mocked for its accent, the goal is escaping twice: initially from their natural accent, and from that which might rub off on them in their new home.
There is something choral about the continual soundscape, sometimes played out against a black screen. These moments of audio-only playback bond us to the sound, make us rely upon it where we would typically be guided by the images. It also presents to us a challenge: we are left wondering which sound is that of the tutor and which is the student, their frequencies jumping and overlapping, meeting only in a few moments in Gregorian harmony. Zdjelar is training us to listen through obscuring the visual indicators. It is hard to tell what sound is coming from the instructor and which from the pupil, what noise is ‘right’, which is ‘wrong’. If we were to hear him speak, the pupil would be instantly noticeable for his accent. And that is what Zdjelar sees as a primary aspect of the video: ‘Obtaining a kind of voice mask allows the immigrant misfit to shift between different modes of appearances, which enable him to blend into the environment, to become unnoticeable.’ The work structures a discussion of neutrality through its use of invisibility.
Of course, the physical mechanism behind the pronunciation of a sound is always invisible. What happens at the back of the throat is not easily ascertained by eye. And so, for the student and the viewer, the tutor uses a second different language, a physical language, to try and convey this. Almost as if he were communicating in sign, the instructor shapes his fingers into circles, next points up and down, then pinches, grasps into a fist, fingers into palm. The instructor's hand gestures are the visible link between the outer and the inner bodily machinations which he is attempting to retrain. We rarely think about the relationship between our bodies and the voices we have. The sounds coming from our mouths don’t call forth in the mind the folds of cartilage and muscle in our larynx, our lungs, tongue, nose, lips and jaw. But these movements of the instructor's hand do work on the viewer, making us aware of our vocal chords - the same appears to happen to the student. Over the course of the video, the student opens up his shoulders more, his body is relaxed, and he gets closer to matching the sounds his instructor is sending out. As Zdjelar says, ‘I am interested in this potentiality of bodies, their ability to demonstrate another reality that opens up the social relation between receiving and having a voice’.
The piece leaves me with a complicated feeling. I was born in Birmingham and grew up here, and whilst I did have the accent a bit when growing up, I have largely lost it. “I’m from Birmingham.” “Well you don’t sound like you are!” Voice and place are often unquestioningly put together. When they are split, dissonance ensues. That’s what Zdjelar is bringing out in ‘The Perfect Sound’. So much of the work is about two sounds not syncing up. The target sound and the one the student is able to make rarely meet perfectly; it’s call and response, but the response is always slightly off.
At first, it is hard to tell what is happening in ‘The Perfect Sound’, what the images we are seeing and sounds we are hearing are about. The ambiguous mouths and rhythmic melodic sounds for me pulled on that other work of teeth and tongue and lips. In Samuel Beckett’s ‘Not I’, the solo protagonist describes in a frenzied stream of phrases the experience of speaking without acknowledging herself, without using the pronoun ‘I’:
all dead still but for the buzzing… when suddenly she realized... words were-... what?.. who?.. no!.. she!...
realized ... words were coming... imagine!.. words were coming ... a voice she did not recognize...
at first... so long since it had sounded... then finally had to admit... could be none other... than her own...
certain vowel sounds she had never heard... elsewhere... so that people would stare...
the rare occasions... once or twice a year.
The audience sees only the mouth of the performer, as if it is floating in a dark nothingness - just as, in ‘The Perfect Sound’, we mostly only see tightly cropped close ups of the two figure’s mouths. Zdjelar’s piece makes us conscious of the words that come from within us, voices that can belong or be lost to us and to the places which we inhabit.
For more information about ‘The Perfect Sound’, including clips from the work, see the following video, created at Werkleitz Festival in 2009.
To learn more about Katarina Zdjelar’s work, including The Perfect Sound, you can find more information through her Instagram. ‘The Perfect Sound’ will be in Budapest in December.
Katarina Zdeljar’s ‘The Perfect Sound’ (2009) is a fourteen-and-a-half-minute-long single-channel video work, comprised largely of shots of the mouths of two men. The first, the older man, is a speech coach. His grey goatee and moustache differentiate him from the second, a younger man who is his student. And our first image is of his mouth, from which we hear the hums and dings and meeeeeeeooooowwwwwssss. These sounds, as in many of Zdjelar’s video pieces, are the core thread of the work, forming an expansive and loudly played audio element which often continues without visual accompaniment. Where images do appear, Zdjelar cuts between them sharply and frequently, the unsteady camerawork evoking a feeling of vibration and movement, a metaphor for the physical nature of sound.
Zdjelar was born in Serbia, and much of her work centres on language, pronunciation, translation, and speech. ‘The Perfect Sound’ was produced in conjunction with the European Media Art Network and Vivid Projects in Birmingham. The lesson she filmed for the video was led by speech therapist Robin Wooldridge at his school of speech and voice. In a conversation with Lucy Cotton, Zdjelar explains that “‘The Perfect Sound’ looks at the phenomenon of cultural integration through the erasure of difference in pronunciation and the production of neutrality”. Indeed, the work is closely cropped and intimate, but it is about the bigger issues of immigration, integration, visibility, and opacity. While we are watching a piece without words, there is a narrative, a dialogue between two protagonists which makes ‘The Perfect Sound’ into a “social drama” as psychoanalyst and critic Mladen Dolar described the video. Yet, this is a distorted version of a typical narrative structure: the student is overcoming a struggle, going through the motions, guided by an older and learned figure, but where the end goal might typically be the achievement of distinction and greatness, here the student seeks the opposite, his quest is for ‘neutrality’, to blend in. The work asks questions of what it is to integrate into a society, of how voices are audible signatures of places. For immigrants coming to a city mocked for its accent, the goal is escaping twice: initially from their natural accent, and from that which might rub off on them in their new home.
There is something choral about the continual soundscape, sometimes played out against a black screen. These moments of audio-only playback bond us to the sound, make us rely upon it where we would typically be guided by the images. It also presents to us a challenge: we are left wondering which sound is that of the tutor and which is the student, their frequencies jumping and overlapping, meeting only in a few moments in Gregorian harmony. Zdjelar is training us to listen through obscuring the visual indicators. It is hard to tell what sound is coming from the instructor and which from the pupil, what noise is ‘right’, which is ‘wrong’. If we were to hear him speak, the pupil would be instantly noticeable for his accent. And that is what Zdjelar sees as a primary aspect of the video: ‘Obtaining a kind of voice mask allows the immigrant misfit to shift between different modes of appearances, which enable him to blend into the environment, to become unnoticeable.’ The work structures a discussion of neutrality through its use of invisibility.
Of course, the physical mechanism behind the pronunciation of a sound is always invisible. What happens at the back of the throat is not easily ascertained by eye. And so, for the student and the viewer, the tutor uses a second different language, a physical language, to try and convey this. Almost as if he were communicating in sign, the instructor shapes his fingers into circles, next points up and down, then pinches, grasps into a fist, fingers into palm. The instructor's hand gestures are the visible link between the outer and the inner bodily machinations which he is attempting to retrain. We rarely think about the relationship between our bodies and the voices we have. The sounds coming from our mouths don’t call forth in the mind the folds of cartilage and muscle in our larynx, our lungs, tongue, nose, lips and jaw. But these movements of the instructor's hand do work on the viewer, making us aware of our vocal chords - the same appears to happen to the student. Over the course of the video, the student opens up his shoulders more, his body is relaxed, and he gets closer to matching the sounds his instructor is sending out. As Zdjelar says, ‘I am interested in this potentiality of bodies, their ability to demonstrate another reality that opens up the social relation between receiving and having a voice’.
The piece leaves me with a complicated feeling. I was born in Birmingham and grew up here, and whilst I did have the accent a bit when growing up, I have largely lost it. “I’m from Birmingham.” “Well you don’t sound like you are!” Voice and place are often unquestioningly put together. When they are split, dissonance ensues. That’s what Zdjelar is bringing out in ‘The Perfect Sound’. So much of the work is about two sounds not syncing up. The target sound and the one the student is able to make rarely meet perfectly; it’s call and response, but the response is always slightly off.
At first, it is hard to tell what is happening in ‘The Perfect Sound’, what the images we are seeing and sounds we are hearing are about. The ambiguous mouths and rhythmic melodic sounds for me pulled on that other work of teeth and tongue and lips. In Samuel Beckett’s ‘Not I’, the solo protagonist describes in a frenzied stream of phrases the experience of speaking without acknowledging herself, without using the pronoun ‘I’:
all dead still but for the buzzing… when suddenly she realized... words were-... what?.. who?.. no!.. she!...
realized ... words were coming... imagine!.. words were coming ... a voice she did not recognize...
at first... so long since it had sounded... then finally had to admit... could be none other... than her own...
certain vowel sounds she had never heard... elsewhere... so that people would stare...
the rare occasions... once or twice a year.
The audience sees only the mouth of the performer, as if it is floating in a dark nothingness - just as, in ‘The Perfect Sound’, we mostly only see tightly cropped close ups of the two figure’s mouths. Zdjelar’s piece makes us conscious of the words that come from within us, voices that can belong or be lost to us and to the places which we inhabit.
For more information about ‘The Perfect Sound’, including clips from the work, see the following video, created at Werkleitz Festival in 2009.
To learn more about Katarina Zdjelar’s work, including The Perfect Sound, you can find more information through her Instagram. ‘The Perfect Sound’ will be in Budapest in December.