Every sound we make: dysfluency, voice, transcription

Every sound we make: dysfluency, voice, transcription

Sunday 8th June, 2-5pm

Launched in February 2025 at Goldsmiths CCA, the FDRG’s ‘Auto’ programmes continues with ‘Every sound we make,’ an out loud reading, listening, and discussion group combining recent writings by Anna Barham and JJJJJerome Ellis alongside Anne Carson’s 1992 germinal essay ‘The Gender of Sound.’ Together these works think about different ways that vocal utterances - both semantic and non-semantic - can be a writing of the self: as Anne Carson writes, “every sound we make is a bit of autobiography.”

Readings

Together we will read from works by Anna Barham, JJJJJerome Ellis, and Anne Carson.  Readings will be circulated to those who register. There is no need to read advance as we will do together, out loud, one person at a time, during the meeting.

Anna Barham’s ‘Michael Dodds,’ 2025, is a thinking aloud with dictation software which explores how a subject comes into being through the voice.  

In ‘The Gender of Sound,’ Anne Carson writes: “History is filled with unacceptable noises: high pitch, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing and ritual shouts. Who makes them? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category.” From the myths of antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, The Gender of Sound charts the gendering of voice through Western culture. This enquiry into the way we hear sounds invites reimagining our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood. 

JJJJJerome Ellis’s ‘The clearing: music, dysfluency, Blackness and time’ asks how stuttering, Blackness, and music can be practices of refusal against hegemonic pop governance of time, speech, and encounter. Taking his glottal block stutter as a point of departure, Ellis figures the aporia and the block as clearing to consider how dysfluency, opacity, and refusal can open a new space for relation.

BIOS

Anna Barham is a London-based artist working between video, sound, writing, installation and live events. Her work explores how language transforms, and what subjectivities are created, as it moves between different bodies and technologies over time.

Anne Carson is a poet and classicist who was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honours include the T. S. Eliot Prize, a Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Prize, on two occasions, fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature 2020.

JJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters. The artist works across music, performance, writing, video, and photography. “I have an ongoing practice of spelling my name JJJJJerome Ellis. I do this because the word I stutter on most frequently is my name.”

 Register for a free ticket here

Access at Goldsmiths CCA

Auto is a programme developed by members of the Feminist Duration Reading Group, exploring recent life writing, auto-theory, and biographically-informed experimental fiction.

Image: Ann Barham