Lara Dâmaso at KRONE COURONNE

Artists: Lara Dâmaso (with Nikima Jagudajev, Tarren Johnson, Mario Petrucci Espinoza)

Exhibition title: ECHOES

Venue: KRONE COURONNE, Biel/Bienne, Switzerland

Date: June 10 – July 16, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and KRONE COURONNE, Biel/Bienne

“The voice is stubbornly, insistently, unabashedly bodily”

– Adriana Cavarero, «For More Than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression» (2005)

ECHOES is a two-part exhibition in the form of a Carte Blanche to performance artist Lara Dâmaso (1996, Biel/Bienne, lives in Zurich), in which she continues her research on the agency of the voice and its intimate, emotional, therapeutic and political potential. The environment of KRONE COURONNE serves as a platform for her voice and the one of her invited artists – Nikima Jagudajev, Tarren Johnson and Mario Petrucci Espinoza – in an attempt to access new forms of vocal communication beyond language.

In the past years, the use of voice has become central to Lara Dâmaso’s artistic practice, especially when used in a dissonant and irrational way. The artist sees it as an equal medium to body movement and dance – or an agent which generates vibrations and connects the inner self and the emotional body to the environment in which it moves. To her, the voice and its potential – as one of the most essential forms of human expression – are only partially explored, not to say ignored, feared or censored.

As stated in Anne Carson’s text “The Gender of Sound” (1995), the feminine voice is connoted as emotional and shrill, while the masculine reflects self-control, confidence and rationality. Besides, the way in which voice is trained in most Western societies is shaped by norms of societal behaviours regulated since childhood, i.e. not to shout, to formulate correct sentences, etc. Its disconnection with the body makes it a controlled tool of the intellect.

Implementing structures of control around body and voice goes against the very idea of movement, whose faculty is supposedly liberating, expressive or assertive. Breaking away from ‘logos’ (as the mute work of the mind or the virtuous substance of spoken speech), the voice – in its emotionally-complex dimensionality – calls for a <em>plurality</em> of singular voices that echo one another. Adriana Cavarero writes in “For More than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression” (2005): ‘[…] what is undeniable in the sound of each voice is the embodied, relational uniqueness of each existent’.

Lara Dâmaso’s performative exhibition ECHOES is an invitation to dialogue and to open up space for voices to circulate, meet and respond to one another, to gain in corporeality and existence, and to become singular and political.

The exhibition runs from 10 June to 16 July in Biel/Bienne. In PART 1, Lara Dâmaso performs, using movements and gestures taken from traditional ballet dance to release and open the voice’s spectrum. Her voice gets amplified by a recording device and resonates in space. In PART 2, the three invited artists attempt to respond to Dâmaso’s exercise with their own voices, activating echoes in the space of KRONE COURONNE.

Lara Dâmaso, Echo chambers, 2022, Multimedia installation, curtains, 3-channel sound installation with performances. With the collaboration of Blanca Bianchi. Credit photo: © Guadelupe Ruiz

Lara Dâmaso, to the unborn: catharsis, 2022. 3-video installation with silk curtain and satin ribbons. With the collaboration of Blanca Bianchi.. Credit photo: © James Bantone

Lara Dâmaso, to the unborn: catharsis, 2022. 3-video installation with silk curtain and satin ribbons. With the collaboration of Blanca Bianchi.. Credit photo: © Guadelupe Ruiz

Performance views ECHOES by Lara Dâmaso, with Nikima Jagudajev, Tarren Johnson and Mario Espinoza, 2022, Krone Couronne. Credit photos: © James Bantone