An individual dressed in black and blue is leaning over pebbles scattered around a room. The scene takes place in a space with a grey floor and white walls.
Lou Chavepayre Cosmo, exhibition view, Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain, Sète, 2022.
Photo: Elise Ortiou Campion, courtesy of the artist

Shifting the Voice: A Crip Approach to Vocality

Maël Forlini
117 – Crip Feature Anaïs Ghedini Lou Chavepayre No Anger
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Turning the voice into artistic material raises fundamental questions about what gets perceived as “natural” in vocal expression. The voice is often considered to be a manifestation of interiority; we also commonly refer to a “vocal signature.” Yet this concept is based on an ableist presupposition: it makes spoken language a central criterion for our humanity and ability to think. This naturalization tends to marginalize people whose voices deviate from this form of expression. Although sound studies have reimagined how we analyze the voice, they often leave intact the implicit idea of a vocal norm. In contrast, a crip perspective denaturalizes the voice, particularly by emphasizing its relationship with technology.

Instead of considering the voice in terms of its provenance, crip approaches, examined in light of different art practices, focus on the voice’s shifts, mediations, delegations, even silences, in order to question the listening conditions that sometimes discredit it. Here, I show how the artists No Anger, Lou Chavepayre, and Anaïs Ghedini use technologies to overturn ableism by focusing on regimes of listening. Although technological innovations started being used to restore the voice to non-speaking people in the eighteenth century, the works considered here propose an antagonistic, or at least critical, usage. From a crip perspective, technological devices make different vocal modes possible. How does shifting the voice, first outside the mouth and then by means of technological mediations and delegations, and emphasizing its reception rather than emission, politicize vocality?

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This article also appears in the issue 117 - Crip
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