Voicing: A Practice of Exodus

Eleni Ikoniadou focuses on Imogen Stidworthy’s work with Iris Johansson, a therapist and writer on the autistic spectrum who was non-verbal until the age of twelve. In Stidworthy’s filmic set-ups, Johansson becomes a mediator or translator between verbal and non-verbal modes of communication, disclosing the latter’s rich grammar of somatic registers, gestures, movements, vibrations and rhythms. Ikoniadou shows how non- (or, better, more-than-) verbal modes of communication find powerful alliance with anticolonial, black and indigenous epistemologies – a ‘chorus of voicings’ attempting to disarticulate the master’s language and to tune into non-human frequencies.