The sound studies theorist Jonathan Sterne points out the widespread ableist tendency to consider the mouth the only organ from which the voice emanates. He calls this mouth\/voice coupling the \u201coral voice\u201d and uses the concept widely in his writing on the subject.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Jonathan Sterne, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 46.<\/span> By de facto denying technological mediations, this idea leads to an abusive simplification of the vocalization process, which in fact uses many parts of the body, and to an invisibilization of other ways of making the voice be heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The works examined here decouple the voice from the mouth, using different methods. In the film Dans ma voix, d\u2019autres voix<\/em> (2024), No Anger, having felt insecure about their voice for a long time, explains that \u201coften my laryngeal voice is allocated to the status of noise and therefore disclaimed as a voice. On the other hand, what about my other voices: the synthesized voice, the written voice projected into the public space, riten from the fonetikaly uteeleetarian dailee <\/em>lyf<\/em>?\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Lucie Camous, host, VARIATIONS<\/em>, episode 1, \u201cNo Anger,\u201d October 4, 2024, 28 min., accessible online (our translation).<\/span> The subtitled film features a montage of texts in white type against a black background, drawings made by No Anger, and different shots of their body. We hear their laryngeal voice and the voices of others in their circle, including their assistant, their speech therapist, and even a former teacher. No Anger therefore considers their voice to be necessarily plural and collective. In light of the constant transitions and slippages between their laryngeal voice, synthesized voice, written voice, corporeal voice, and others\u2019 voices, their mouth is no longer the exclusive site of vocal emission.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Ghedini\u2019s and Chavepayre\u2019s installations are based on staging \u201cacousmatic\u201d voices\u200a\u2014\u200athat is, bodiless, spectral voices whose source is invisible. In Voix-Fant\u00f4mes courent sur les murs<\/em> (2023), Ghedini plays on this vocal immateriality. Two loudspeakers positioned at ear height emit voices whose speaking bodies are not identifiable. Chavepayre\u2019s Cosmo<\/em> (2022) consists of a collection of stones and cast body fragments spread out on the floor. A voice at low volume emanates from one of the stones. Chavepayre explains that \u201cperhaps the stones are speaking but we can\u2019t hear them. Just like the stars and just like people with disabilities.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Rapha\u00ebl Cuir, \u201cLou Chavepayre,\u201d artpress<\/em>, no. 536 (October 2025): 7 (our translation).<\/span> In both works, bodiless voices are shifted and embodied elsewhere. The installations show the voice\u2019s \u201cintermateriality,\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Sterne, Diminished Faculties<\/em>, 56.<\/span> understood as a phenomenon circulating among individuals, objects, and technological devices, and emphasize that the subject itself is constituted through these mediations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fruitful process of decoupling the voice from the mouth leads to examining the role that machines play in the vocal process. Produced without direct, human, vocal emission, the synthesized voice is often perceived as cold and dehumanized. For this reason, it is even more devalorized than the recorded voice, which remains a captured human voice even though it also undergoes technological transformation. This contradictory perception is telling, because it clearly illustrates the profoundly ableist conception of the voice: yet the machine doesn\u2019t take away any of its humanity\u200a\u2014\u200aon the contrary, it makes the conditions of any enunciation visible. In the exhibition Sph\u00e8re code cylindre<\/em> (2023), presented at the Mus\u00e9e Granet in Aix-en-Provence, Ghedini proposed a sound work in a museum context dominated by visual works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She composed an installation in which her spoken and whispered voice interacts, intermixes, and is overlaid with a synthesized voice in non-hierarchical ways, as shown by the following directions describing a kind of computer code: \u201cThe digit \u20180\u2019 is read by MY VOICE, the digit \u20181\u2019 is read by A SYNTHESIZED VOICE. The last \u20181\u2019 is read by the two VOICES in chorus.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - \u201cVoix-Fant\u00f4mes courent sur les murs,\u201d Ana\u00efs Ghedini, transcription of work, February 27, 2026, accessible online (our translation).<\/span> In No Anger\u2019s work, the machine is omnipresent: synthesized voices and screen captures of word-processing software and tonal modifications of the voice. Instead of showing a fusion between body and machine, these apparatuses reveal the sutures and adjustments of mediated speech. It is a trick for blurring the distinction between the two, since this union is not self-evident; as No Anger humorously articulates, \u201cIsabelle, my synthesized voice, is a real bitch.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - No Anger, \u201cDes voix et des normes,\u201d \u00c0 mon geste d\u00e9fendant : essais de th\u00e9orisation antivalidiste \u00e0 partir d\u2019un corps<\/em>, blog, September 30, 2020, accessible online (our translation).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The works presented here avoid this pitfall by staking a claim for an aesthetics of fragility and low tech without ever naturalizing technological devices.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The philosopher and crip activist Charlotte Puiseux establishes a link between technological mediation and the value of speech for non-speaking people by asserting that \u201cwe all speak through technological means today.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Charlotte Puiseux, De chair et de fer : vivre et lutter dans une soci\u00e9t\u00e9 validiste<\/em> (Paris: La D\u00e9couverte, 2022), 95\u20136 (our translation).<\/span> Puiseux examines the position and conditions of listening more than those of vocal emission. Although technological mediation makes the voice possible, it does not guarantee its intelligibility and effectiveness. It may also lead to a feeling of dispossession produced by intermediaries and different forms of delegating the voice. We can therefore consider these three works polyphonic apparatuses with diverse voices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In their film, No Anger describes how for a long time they entrusted their texts to others to read out loud. Ultimately, this default delegation ended up feeling unbearable to them. The acquisition of a synthesized voice allowed them to reappropriate their own voice. Alison Kafer, a professor and scholar specializing in feminist, queer, and disability theory, evokes a form of dispossession: \u201cPeople have been telling my future for years \u2026 my wheelchair, burn scars, and gnarled hands apparently tell them all they need to know. My future is written on my body.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip<\/em> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 1.<\/span> She points out that because she is disabled, people use her disability as a pretext to take away her voice: her body is discussed and ventriloquized by others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cosmo<\/em> replays Kafer\u2019s account in a literal way. For this work, Chavepayre asked her assistant to phone a psychic without informing her about Chavepayre\u2019s significant motor disability. The sound installation allows us to hear the psychic\u2019s words: \u201cThe other, the person across from you anyway, they can\u2019t figure out what you want to say \u2026 The words are not appropriate to what you would like to convey \u2026 But there is an entire vastness that can\u2019t be said in one word. In our humanity, in our incarnation, in our body, we can\u2019t have just immensity\u200a\u2014\u200awe also have limitations.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Lou Chavepayre, \u201cCosmo,\u201d soundtrack, 2022, accessible online (our translation).<\/span> By retaining only these confusing statements from her interview with the psychic, Chavepayre gives an ironic nod to her own life as a disabled person. Although the psychic\u2019s voice invokes a strong presence and authority (that of reading the future), what she says is ultimately very vague, hollow, allusive, even abstruse, which has the effect of undermining the presupposition that associates voice, presence, and veracity. Here, Chavepayre reverses the attention: it is no longer about understanding how the voice is produced but about considering how it is received and invested with authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The vocal practices of No Anger, Chavepayre, and Ghedini actualize what the authors Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch call \u201ccrip technoscience: practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world\u201d12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Hamraie and Fritsch, \u201cCrip Technoscience Manifesto,\u201d 2.<\/span> as conceptualized by disabled people. The three artists show that it is not the voices that are deficient but the listening conditions that discriminate against them. Without denying the sometimes difficult psychological and medical realities that disabled people individually experience, a crip perspective allows us to eschew an essentialist and apolitical approach to voice, disability, and technology. The disabled and marginalized voice is never repaired or integrated into an existing ableist framework: on the contrary, it becomes the place where the modes of its exclusion are brought to light, while also offering new mental states with multiple vocalities that are always technological and plural. \u201cCripping\u201d the voice becomes a highly political act: because the voice is seen as conveying language, it allows us to question language, erode binaries, and ultimately shake up the opposition between ableist and disabled. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated by Oana Avasilichioaei<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Turning the voice into artistic material raises fundamental questions about what gets perceived as \u201cnatural\u201d in vocal expression. The voice is often considered to be a manifestation of interiority; we also commonly refer to a \u201cvocal signature.\u201d 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.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":275644,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[8014],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[8022],"artistes":[8056,8050,8086],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[319],"class_list":["post-275667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-117-crip","auteurs-mael-forlini-en","artistes-anais-ghedini-en","artistes-lou-chavepayre-en","artistes-no-anger-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275667"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275675,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275667\/revisions\/275675"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275667"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=275667"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=275667"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=275667"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=275667"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=275667"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=275667"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=275667"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=275667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/117_DO_Forlini_No-Anger_dansmavoixdautresvoix_P.Herve-Veronese-scaled.jpg\")
Dans ma voix, d\u2019autres voix<\/em>, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2024.
Photo: Herv\u00e9 V\u00e9ron\u00e8se, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/117_DO_Forlini_Anais-Ghedini_voixfantomecourentsurlesmurs_01-scaled.jpg\")
Voix-Fant\u00f4mes courent sur les murs<\/em>, installation view, Mus\u00e9e Granet, Aix-en-Provence, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Mus\u00e9e Granet, Aix-en-Provence<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nThe Voice and the Machine<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/117_DO_Forlini_Anais-Ghedini_voixfantomecourentsurlesmurs_05.jpg\")
Voix-Fant\u00f4mes courent sur les murs<\/em>, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The figure of the cyborg developed by Donna Haraway allows us to consider the continuity between body and technology: \u201cWhy should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Donna J. Haraway, \u201cA Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,\u201d in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 1991), 178.<\/span> However, this figure poses a risk\u200a\u2014\u200athe risk of reinforcing a restorative reading of disability, which transforms technologically assisted bodies into \u201cpost-human paragons,\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Kathryn Allan quoted in Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, \u201cCrip Technoscience Manifesto,\u201d Catalyst<\/em> 5, no. 1 (2019): 13, accessible online.<\/span> as expressed by the disability studies researcher Kathryn Allan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
The Delegated Voice<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/117_DO_Forlini_No-Anger_dansmavoixdautresvoix_03.jpg\")
Dans ma voix, d\u2019autres voix<\/em>, video still, 2024.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Pebbles](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/117_DO_Forlini_Lou-Chavepayre_Cosmo_02-1.jpg\")
Cosmo<\/em>, exhibition view, Forum Schlossplatz, Aarau, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n